Seaside summer holiday locales the world over seem to take on a universal winter mood, going by today’s Poet’s Corner contribution from English poet Jeremy Page.

Close Season

They say it smells of dead holidays.
I say it always did. And out of season
was never the time to connect anything
with anything here, where you can only
wonder at the sea in all those shades
of grey that Richter* might have painted,
wonder where the ice-cream vendors
go and if the deckchair man can really
hibernate in his cave beneath the cliff,
with the deckchairs, his memories of summer.

On the pier a scrap of gaudy poster
flaps forlornly in the breeze, and
somewhere close a ship’s bell tolls
for something gone, for something lost.

*Gerhard Richter (1932–), German illusionist painter and visual artist, a pioneer of the New European Painting Movement of the second half of the 20th century.

Jeremy Page lives in the historic market town of Lewes in the South Downs of England’s East Sussex. He has edited the UK literary journal The Frogmore Papers since co-founding it in 1983. His short stories have been widely published, and he is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Closing Time from Pindrop Press this year. His translations of the Lesbia poems of Catullus, were published as The Cost of All Desire, from Ashley Press, in 2011.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. A poetry book will be awarded to each contributor.