Sankt Peter-Ording

Fen-brother space, vast and rinsed-clean it is flat here, kindred, the gulls chasing inward, the cold white hulls of a thousand pleasure boats framed as subtitle to the wide sky. I wander, snapping each taut tie that kept me tethered to England. The voice of the sea is always in the air; it becomes a sense, a sentence, a new sort of tense, a time frozen in seashell roar. Would have done me no bloody good to live away from the water - we fen-folk dwell son and daughter to the endless undertow blue.