A tale of two cliffs, one presumably in the south of England, the other somewhere in Scotland. The describer of both is the poet-cleric Andrew Young, whose Selected Poems are published by Carcanet at £9.95.
THE CHALK-CLIFF
Blasted and bored and undermined
By quarrying seas
Reared the erect chalk-cliff with black flints lined.
(Flints drop like nuts from trees
When the frost bites
The chalk on winter nights.)
~
Save for frail shade of jackdaw’s flight
No night was there,
But blue-skyed summer and a cliff so white
It stood like frozen air;
Foot slipped on damp
Chalk where the limpets camp.
~
With only purple of sea-stock
And jackdaw’s shade
To mitigate that blazing height of chalk
I stood like a soul strayed
In paradise
Hiding my blinded eyes.
THE ECHOING CLIFF
White gulls that sit and float,
Each on his shadow like a boat,
Sandpipers, oystercatchers
And herons, those grey stilted watchers,
From loch and corran rise,
And as they scream and squawk abuse
Echo from wooded cliff replies
So clearly that the dark pine boughs,
Where goldcrests flit
And owls in drowsy wisdom sit,
Are filled with seabirds and their cries.
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