The beach at Deia

It is a house inhabited by ghosts
Your totems, your carefully folded shirts
Shaped terraces of lavender and thyme
Tall carobs and orange and lemon trees.

There must have been enough of England in Deia
In the grey cliffs that walled your domain
In the sycamores by the rushing brook
And the white hawthorns frothing by the road

There is a different poetry here
Where stepped mountains climb to the sky
Of tumbling orchards of olive and fig
Of jigsaw boulders and the super-charged stream

Slicing though tortured cliffs like an ogre's house
Today, there is a world you never knew
The parked hatchbacks are like silverfish
There is a barrier across the sacred grove


We walked down the road to your beach
To your crystal pool, somehow defiled
By a driftwood bar, the colours of Europe laid out
Flakes of plastic, like shells, on the grey stones.

Water does not change – the sigh of the spinning brook
The glowing of flesh opened to the sun
I sat on the beach with a black goddess
Your lemon in our wine. Thank you Mr Graves