Sarah de Nordwall's Blog - Poetry Opens the World

The Coastal Robot

or On looking out of the East Coast train from London to Edinburgh


Incredible how the sea dispels alarm

Arousing joy without a cause



Immediate!


A sight of inevitable bliss so inarticulate

and yet replete with messages and thrones.


Then suddenly a monstrous thing

a squat and hideous robot,

square and brute

Sits on the coast line like an ugly toy left out by troll children

Blind to the ravishing waves.


A factory made of concrete blocks.

A nuclear power station?

What exactly is it?

Could one possibly say
Without initiation into madness of the bluntest kind?

And there and here beside the railway tracks

Vast cylinders and wagons,

making grey a frightful thing


Whilst the veiling mist attempts a kind reminder of the truthful nature of this
Heavenly shade... so close to silver and to dawn.


But peace;
the breath returns and someone with a gentle eye has now laid out the land.

A green field
of a generous startling hue


gives us a barn
with a long bright roof of red.


a white house by a fallow field
and a crimson post van in a country lane,


Its speed commensurate with human dignity
And a sense of pace of life.


Oh Lord protect us from the paceless things

That sit enthroned in deathless tedium.

Rip out the horrors that can never breathe

And fill again our earth with life that dies

And naturally expires in rapturous gratitude.


How wonderful that things ephemeral

Lift up our fragile hopes into eternity.

Whilst stolid robots, stiff with glass eyed potency

Will, changeless, fall entire into the night.