In our most recent annual poetry anthology, Folio 77, we mistakenly mis-attributed Society member Charlie Bell’s poem Cuckmere Haven to a different poet, Mara Bergman. With apologies to both Mara and Charlie, we are re-publishing it here with the correct attribution.
While it is unfortunately too late to reprint the anthology, we have corrected it in a pdf version which has been shared with Charlie.
Meanwhile, we are now preparing the 2024 Folio (number 78).
Cuckmere Haven
From a Ravilious painting of 1939
Between the sea and sky there be monsters.
We learnt about meanders and ox-bow lakes at school.
The theory seemed plausible but they sounded so dull.
A field trip to Cuckmere in 1970 showed otherwise.
I knew the physics and hydrology of it,
yet nothing prepared me for the real thing.
Before me sprawled a landscape of the imagination.
Here were languid serpents, large and small -
mind worms wriggling and slithering.
Cuckmere burrowing into my brain,
the larger serpent forever twisting towards the vanishing point,
where be other monsters.
Charlie Bell
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 