Dusk, Burnham-Overy-Staithe
Dusk, Burnham-Overy-Staithe - Kevin Crossley Holland
Burnham-Overy-Staithe is a little coastal village in North Norfolk - my grandparents lived there and I returned to live in another of the Burnhams.
Dusk, Burnham-Overy-Staithe
The blue hour ends, this world
floats on a great stillness.
I only guess where marsh
finishes and sky begins,
each grows out of the other.
In the creek a slip
of water gleams. Rowboats
bob and swing above the mud,
the barnacled and broken
ribs of Old Stoker’s boat.
A wedge of gulls rustles
overhead, and for a moment
the water notices them.
Such calm is some prelude.
Then across the marsh it comes,
the sound as of an endless
train in a distant cutting,
the god working his way back,
butting and shunting,
reclaiming his territory.
This world’s his soundbox now;
in the stillness he still moves.
Anything could happen.
from Selected Poems (Enitharmon, 2001), copyright © Kevin Crossley-Holland 2001, used by permission of the author and the publisher.