(at a time of the breaking of nations)

Surfers in black skins
wait in the waves like dolmens
a soft tide creams the sand.

These pure white pebbles could,
in a full moon, light a path for babes
out of the murderous wood.

Here is the sea,
somewhere is land. Our journeys
are many, and various.

A child sends paper boats
across a pool. My car
gets ferried home on a flat belt of water.

At Calais a boy
black-skinned like the surfers
stands by his tent, its blazon
‘London, my dream’.

Ann Pilling, June 2016. Prizewinner in Torbay Poetry Competition 2016.

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