Cromer Pier

The crowds are out today. The carpark full,
queues at the chipshops, throngs along the rail
outside the Hotel de Paris to watch
the waiters' race, the runners spilling beer.
The winner gets a six-pack and a kiss
from young Miss Cromer, in her princess frock,
pulling her sash straight for the camera.
Behind them, on the pier, the fishers fish,
the walkers walk, the ice-cream vendors vend.
And all is as it should be, and has been
a century and more since engineers
pitched out this frail, gratuitous promontary,
this bridge to nowhere between sea and sky.
Down at the eastward end, a silver dome,
a theatre held at arm's length from the shore
as though to prove a point - that shows go on,
perhaps, that songs are stronger than the storm,
that art can stand against an angry sea.
The kind of strutting, wanton showmanship
that builds a monastery on a mountaintop
and dares both hell and heaven to come and see.
Next to the theatre, another hall,
the lifeboat station, whose proscenium arch
is open to the weather and the waves,
the shifting stage whose audience is the air.
The lifeboat, balanced on the slipway, waits,
like one of those collection box displays;
the single penny of a stranger's soul,
will send it, calm, where God would fear to go.
A summer Sunday. On the promenade,
the old recall their childhood holidays,
and find the town grown smaller with the years.
The young, whose only scale is sea and sand,
think nothing ever changes. In the fair,
the carousel's stiff, painted cavalry
revolve to music never heard elsewhere,
and pennies rattle in the dark arcade.
The nearness to the edge, the nothingness
that makes all things that live seem more alive,
perhaps that's why we come. Perhaps that's why
we set this cast-iron causeway in the sea,
as far as we can get from solid ground,
to hold the stage and slipway side by side,
as close to the horizon as can be.