Sea Front

The Portsmouth Laureate job made me wonder how many poems I'd written about Portsmouth in the 28, is it, years since I came here.

Not many specifically about it, really. But this came to mind and, after some time excavating the room upstairs, eventually to hand.

In 1982, at the time of the Falklands War, I watched a grey battleship merging into the mist one morning as it left, and then wrote this, which was then included in my typed and stapled collection 14 Poems in 1986.

The first line had described the absolute flat calm of the sea but I was told at a poetry group meeting that the sea is big and powerful and so, rather too meekly, I changed it rather than stick to my description of what it was really like.

What you must do in poetry, you see, is write cliche after cliche or else nobody will believe you. Still, it was three decades ago now and I'm not letting it annoy me at all.