Richard Westcott's poetry

Summer time – sea and sand… We live near the sea, so find ourselves there quite a bit, not just at this time of year. Especially now though, with grandchildren expecting a day on the beach.   Buckets and spades, bats and balls, bags of food and drink, towels and clothes and all that paraphernalia we lug down… playing on the sand is both a simple and a complicated business. I don’t know if it’s something to do with getting older, but increasingly now when I’m at the seaside I find myself reminded of death and destruction. The very sand is substantially made up of countless shells, exoskeletons of once living creatures, each one painstakingly self-constructed.   From them all, the life has gone.   And now the gracefully fashioned ceramic, the solid part that managed to survive (if that be the word), long after the contents vanished, is itself ground up, or down, into dust – or, in this context, sand. Then there’s the crab containers, the cuttlefish shiel...

Ruins Broken arches and ragged walls – this time-worn structure lies abandoned open to the sky. A site of great activity of business to produce and reproduce – here lived a busy population now gone.   They and their progeny have all moved on heavy with possessions leaving this building to start again. No evidence of artillery damage, bombs or snipers no pocked plaster – now these rooms, once good accommodation, are forsaken and forgotten. Polished floors and smoothed corners rounded steps from frequent use by inmates, born and bred within these narrow cells where no space is wasted in neat design. Nothing left of them except a lingering mustiness of propolis. Ancient sweetness remains somehow embedded long after their departure. The bees have flown each hexagon has done its work – the pods end in a point, an illusion repeating patterns of ruination. My hand crumbles masonry fragments to the lig...