They looked, from the hill-top, upon a wonder of a beach,
the roll of ice-blue pebbles at its top looking
sculpted, decorous, the sand so bright an orange
it might have been conjured to alchemic gold.

Beyond the beach, the morning bulk of sea, its shades
of turquoise, slate-grey, aquamarine, the might of it
heading out to the Irish Sea, the ocean, the Americas.
Behind, the cliffs, the green and the border of the land.

So it was, had been, before the car, the B&B,
Gladstone, mad George the Third, Welsh princes,
ambition, red queen Elizabeth, the Norman Conqueror,
Caesar’s men. Householders working in bronze, in iron.

Such permanence. And yet, for Gareth and Julie,
car-parked, intimate, flushed with emotion’s suddenness,
the beach seemed, in the fall of wave on sand, even
of air on sea, to be soaked in the morning’s newness.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who has published widely in Britain and the USA. He was shortlisted this year for the Wordsworth Trust Prize.