Postcard from Barrow
Five o’clock at the end of Ocean Road, a string of stones
along the shore, each with a shadow longer, more misshapen than the next.
You would put your hand on each one if you were here.
You would put your hand on each one, run over the cracks
to look for tiny, pointless beauty, a seam or a spray of lichen.
You would not mention how the sun soaks down the sides of the houses,
how the old, damp light clings to the bottom of each reed.
There would be no reflection but a hole in the sky,
an inverted moon, a channel, a corridor out.
Amy Lees is a happy convert to life in Norfolk, and her poems have been published in Envoi and Stride, and in anthologies by Gatehouse, Poetry Now and Forward Press.