ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Use ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½.com or the new ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ App to listen to ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK.

Episode details

Radio 3,2 mins

Something New: Luke Wright reads Covehithe Beach

The Verb

Available for over a year

The sky’s a unscratched scratchcard. The blue hour lingers. Sit, my love. We’ll watch the cold sand brighten, hope for a fracture in the clouds, a window brought by luck to let dawn light this battlefield beach sown with bones, bleached victims of the putsch the sea enacts upon the land. Its reach is long. It doesn’t care about the ruck and rustle of our lives. Look up. The pipes of homes long since dragged down stick out from the cliff. Trees shucked of bark form a skeletal flowerbed, and something in that black tide drowns my buoyant heart, pulls at it in dread. Matthew Arnold, years ago saw it from the cliffs on honeymoon, that sadness in the Channel’s ebb and flow and made lament for loss of God. Today I’m borrowing his tune to shout my worries at the cod. Listen. A thoughtless sea is rising up, engulfing promenades, slow-eroding cliffs that stood for years. It trickles into homes it takes us all off-guard they’re sandbagging the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½, the NHS, the Commons. Check your phone, and see the salt marks. It’s right here. Hold me in a cwtch. Though I know it will not stop the sea from rising up, to know that you love me can feel enough. Love, I float at your touch. Look now, as if for us, the latex grey is scraped away by dawn’s swift fingernails. Light spills, thrills us. Far out a tanker sails off to trade in some exotic bay where other lovers cwtch and children play.

Programme Website
More episodes