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| Title: |
Brink |
| Artist: |
The Last Big Secret
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| Album: |
Courting Professor Alzheimer |
| Copyright: |
Caroline Fox |
| Description: |
The White Cliffs - vertigo, suicides and war scars
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| Lyrics: |
Brink
You climb the narrow ledge and path
and grasp at tussocks on the way -
wind your fingers through coarse strands
held in soil, thin as old man's skin.
You climb.
Below, reduced to toys, the ferries come and go,
leave trails in turquoise milk
and weed-black boulders sit like gems
where thin broth gruels chalk's bone.
Above, the hollow socket caves
blindly stare to France.
This is where one finds perspective,
high at the crumbling edge of knowledge,
where rusting gun stumps wart the downland,
sanity splits a cliff from sky,
foothold, flight - a cringe between
the shoulders' blades.
Higher than the swoop of gulls
lingers ropes of twisted air - despair which
took that step too far.
You dare yourself a lean and peer -
your hands ... extended fingers, upward curving
at the tips, a remnant instinct - twinge of wings.
You pull away,
scream inwardly at your birdbrain devil ...
something calls you back,
like the kittiwake's echo off polished stones,
the wind through picked-clean shells,
or the bitter sap of wild cabbage
assailing nostrils' flare.
You try to brush the white smears from your clothes,
but take a little of Dover home.
Caroline Fox
January 2003
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