Eight years into the 21st century, eight years on from mass presentiments of the end of days. Well, thanks to good old-fashioned human greed and stupidity amongst the most highly placed, 2009  should manage the fraying of their edges at least. I wish all of us some insulation at least against the worst effects of their incompetence and irresponsibility.

Happy New Year, folks...

PASSING THE MILLENNIUM AT GURNARD’S HEAD

Those three horsemen spotted by the prophets
balked the jump.  Their hour came and went:
no hooves beating down the dry stone walls,
just a bitter wind wrapping up the house. 

Inside, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and that choral counting
backwards, chanting out this year like it was
just another dead leaf burden to be kissed
into the fire. And then it was (implausibly) 2000

and they broke open the magnums. We stepped
outside, took the muddy path to the field’s edge. 
So quiet at first. The wild world’s calm indifference:
cattle hunched clumsy by the bulky walls;

an owl that hooted once; the whisper of the gorse,
thorn against thorn, stones rasping underfoot. 
And then, sensed first as restless space, then heard
as a presence inside silence, the black Atlantic,

breathing deep, breathing deep across the parabola
and beyond.  While Gurnard’s Head gazed inland,
uninvolved, one more optimistic tide clambered
over cobbles way below.  Out in the long darkness

it pulled, pulled, lingering on rocks and sand:
‘Reverse the narrative’, it seethed. ‘Turn back time
return to source’.  The message cackled
in the shingle, boomed along the shore.  We waited

in the rattling night one full hour into the millennium. 
But nothing shifted, tilted, slipped or fell away.
Wind and sea, implacable land, unyielding
dark. So we climbed back up the slope

to the silent house, slept briefly and woke to a
blustery dawn. And a voice inside the wind laughed
in formless vowels; and a brief shape-changing
cloud-face grinned across the unaltered world

...