Wonderful Worthing Promenade Part 1
Five miles of neatly spaced suckered palm planted
Bustling promenade,
Not withstanding a provincial cafe-culture
Of restaurants and exciting little bars,
Enhance upon regal elegance of the crammed hotels
Regency period style facades;
Their fashionable shadows slowly lifting and slowly falling
Across the lines of deferentially, slowly moving cars.
Trundling on down Marina Parade,
Some, perhaps, making their way onto Brighton road:
Day trippers and boisterous holiday makers for Lancing,
Shoreham and the other side of Hove.
Happy lovers, sedentary couples, retired gentlemen casually dressed
In their slacks and checked tweeds,
Kids with plastic spades and empty buckets;
Strolling parents pulling back hard on taut leads -
wrestling with overly excited, barking hounds of all types and all breeds.
Boastful flat Georgian roofs and ionic columns of dazzling lilacs,
Primrose and purest whites...
Oh what marvelously pleasing lines of sublime English Riviera -
Greek revival delight.
Pediments, decorative cornice, dormiers, bracketed balconies...
And dare i say: just a touch of Queen Anne?
Town of exquisite par excellence - so perfectly genteel -
So spick and so span!
Long gone: The Dragoons, the smugglers, the looters, the wreckers
And hoarders;
Now out in the Channel: Bathers, windsurfers, and sailors
Brave the crested waves of warming blue waters.
Long gone: The boatbuilders, the fishing smacks, the old salts
Who wound upon these rusting Capstans that hauled the steel hawsers;
Trapped within shimmering mirages, just hazy distortions
That confuse and bewilder: The spotter, the tourist, the after-lunch walkers.
Elegant Pavilion Theatre, crowned with Mansard liken lead dome roofs,
Aesthetically combine
As grandest frontage to your magnificent Victorian pier
Of eighteen sixty one: Stream-Line - Art Deco design.
Wailing gulls, screaming at crashing rollers, tumble over and over
Beneath cloudless days,
Aligning on smooth painted rails held proudly aloft -
Iron legs running defiantly out into Britannias ruling waves.
Frothing Spumes teasing with Golden curls frolic atop
Of the grey speckled foams,
That stooping, scoop up and scatter upon a pebbled beach:
With ancient Coombe rock, polished flints and rattling multicoloured stones.
Slatted timber Groynes and revetments sympathize
Amidst the wretched sands forlorn, despairing groans;
Longshore drifts incessant lap, lap, lap, lullaby drowning out
An objectionable, long-suffering coastlines mournful, ill-fated undertones.
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