A tale of two cliffs, one presumably in the south of England, the other somewhere in Scotland. The describer of both is the poet-cleric Andrew Young, whose Selected Poems are published by Carcanet at £9.95.

           THE CHALK-CLIFF

Blasted and bored and undermined

By quarrying seas

Reared the erect chalk-cliff with black flints lined.

(Flints drop like nuts from trees

When the frost bites

The chalk on winter nights.)

~

Save for frail shade of jackdaw’s flight

No night was there,

But blue-skyed summer and a cliff so white

It stood like frozen air;

Foot slipped on damp

Chalk where the limpets camp.

~

With only purple of sea-stock

And jackdaw’s shade

To mitigate that blazing height of chalk

I stood like a soul strayed

In paradise

Hiding my blinded eyes.

THE ECHOING CLIFF

White gulls that sit and float,

Each on his shadow like a boat,

Sandpipers, oystercatchers

And herons, those grey stilted watchers,

From loch and corran rise,

And as they scream and squawk abuse

Echo from wooded cliff replies

So clearly that the dark pine boughs,

Where goldcrests flit

And owls in drowsy wisdom sit,

Are filled with seabirds and their cries.