Reading:
Porthgaworra Once you reach the clifftop you find the sea is on your left. Atlantic rollers crash on rocks a hundred feet below, Though too far off to hear the roar as foam arcs upward. Tracts of hedgehog-spiny gorse and heather billow On your right. Yellow and mauve all mixed together heft To a blue horizon. Now squint your eyes against the midday sun And glance along the surface. Their colours blend in perfect Complement, an impressionist feast of dove-grey Tinted velvet quilting such as might delight a Monet. Scythed by on-shore winds they huddle tight, Shoulder to shoulder in endless rippling mounds. Each battling for a toehold in grounds that are Not soil but merest shim of dust and grains Weathered by winds and rains from bedrock. They’d struck a truce in Darwin’s struggle for existence, An agreement to share the space, each to his own In a chequerboard of thorny pillows a foot or two square. By leaving their neighbours alone they thrive there Even when no sunlight breaks the clouds’ resistance. Between them flourish smaller flowers, sea-pink or thrift Prominent among them. They’d made shift in this Alarming world by laying low and keeping their heads down. A midget Queen Anne’s Lace nods here and there, an inch Or two above such turf as yet unconquered by the drifts of scrub. Those that poked their umbels up above the heather Were dealt with sharply by the never-ending bluster of the weather. A few yards in, and sheltered from the gales, Waist-high blackthorn blocks the way. Paths meander through this wilderness of prickles, Strange contour lines that mark a hidden truth Of easier going known only to the feet Of sheep in search of food on meagre grazing. A welcome opening in the verge on either hand, Sees trampled wrecks of what might be parsley of some kind. Among them, seizing on this unexpected gift: the light of day Several sorts of daisies and in the finer grass, those tiny lemon stars We never could never find the name of in the fact sheet. All the wildflowers of Penwith getting along together somehow, A floral conversation about survival in a savage land. There’s a lesson in this for each of us. Somewhere.
Peter Lloyd Jones 