A stride in time
The beach is trying
Cleanliness is foam
The ocean has a home.
Cliffs are dark
The edge is stark,
I seem insignificant
Yet it all mattered.
The ride was so long
The journey cost me petrol money
The children sang songs
The sea told of our arrival & smelled funny.
Salt in the air
Keeping me aware
Telling me of tomorrow
When I will not know sorrow.
Nature is the gaol
The shallow hole in the soul
Where the tempest is not calm
For all the world to harm
The latent gin and gun
And saddest waves to come
Of fashion. Oldness. Tired waistlines.
Missing the womb of creation
Where the meat and metre is fine.
The beach ball is not so fancied
As time with the placard for chips and cheese
& the new style of dancing
Is keeping me up to date with daily needs.
This was the point of our journey
A merry union of the sun with the sky
Where shy children can laugh and play
And the shadows do not touch the day.

AI Summary

Your poem begins with a quiet seaside moment where nature makes you feel small but strangely held, as if tomorrow might hurt less. It moves between innocence — children singing, chips and cheese, sunlight — and the deeper shadows of age, sorrow and the “shallow hole in the soul.” The beach becomes a place where time, memory and the body’s tiredness meet, yet the day still offers a brief union of light, play and peace. Underneath it all is a longing for a world where shadows don’t touch the day — where joy, however fragile, can stay long enough to matter.