'The Black Beach' and 'Love' by Sheenagh Pugh

THE BLACK BEACH

(Skogarstrand, South Iceland)

Nobody told us it was going to be black.
Day at the beach, see the puffins, fine
and there it was,
   black.
   Not streaked with coal,
nor shaly, nor polluted; just pure ash

as fine as sand, running through our hands
and leaving no mark where we looked to see
a sooty smudge; uncanny like a man
without footprints. The sea creamed in,

bone-white, startling; edging with lace
the black velvet. You could have sat down,
but no one did: no-one picnicked or made
sand-pies of the stuff. It was beautiful,

really beautiful, that stretch of darkness,
but people trod it as if they were walking 
iver their graves. A seal's shining head
surfaced close; seemed to look, then sheered off.



LOVE

Bjarni drive the bus through fields of black
volcanic lava crusted with new moss
for visiting Americans who see
his country through the newest Leica lens.

Bjarni's eyes are never on the road;
at every moment they are wandering 
to distant ice and skeins of falling water
and hills enamelled with small quiet flowers.

The land he shows the tourists every day
does not go stale for him; it hurts him more
all the time; its intimacy, its lovely
uncommonness. Bjarni tells his busload

About Gunnar, who to save his life
would not leave the slopes where his wheat grew,
the ones we are now passing on the right.
His voice shakes; he knows how Gunnar felt.