<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At the Beach<\/strong> swimsuit the perfect camouflage Reluctantly torn from feats of sand swimming-rings, cupped our hands perched on the bonnet of every car. and disdain, then fell asleep. not even a mirage. We eventually our anxious search you looked surprised, you were unusually quiet, whether <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Maurice Devitt<\/strong> was runner-up in The Interpreter\u2019s House<\/em> Poetry Competition in 2017. He runs the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site and is a founder member of the Hibernian Writers\u2019 Group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the Beach for Anne \u00a0 One day that summer you disappeared for hours. As though tired of Sisyphus and the task of filling a moat, you wandered off, your pink, polka-dot swimsuit the perfect camouflage on a beach that looked like a Pollock canvas, where every eight-year-old girl was a walk-on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14864"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15224,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14864\/revisions\/15224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nfor Anne <\/em>
\n\u00a0<\/em>
\nOne day that summer you disappeared
\nfor hours. As though tired of Sisyphus
\nand the task of filling a moat, you
\nwandered off, your pink, polka-dot<\/p>\n
\non a beach that looked like a Pollock
\ncanvas, where every eight-year-old girl
\nwas a walk-on from Spot the Difference.<\/p>\n
\nengineering, we slouched across the strand
\nin Brownian motion, cutting a path
\nbetween towels and orphaned<\/p>\n
\nto call your name, only for it
\nto be muzzled by the crackly sound
\nof disembodied voices from transistors<\/p>\n
\nOlder striped men in deck-chairs
\nwoke one-eyed from younger dreams,
\nlooked at us with a mix of sympathy<\/p>\n
\nWe scanned the wending dunes,
\nhalf expecting an appearance
\nfrom Peter O\u2019Toole, but saw nothing,<\/p>\n
\nfound you behind a wind-break,
\neating a picnic with a family
\nyou didn\u2019t know. When I described<\/p>\n
\nas though you didn\u2019t even know
\nyou were lost and in the back
\nof the Volkswagen driving home,<\/p>\n
\nfrom the telling-off or something
\nyou had been given
\nthat you didn\u2019t want to share.<\/p>\n