The fog came in from off the Humber,
a winter grey that took the light —
Haile Sands Fort loomed through the murk,
a sentinel through fading sight.
The fog horns boom eerily,
across the flats their voices travel;
the wind turbines, usually turning,
fade to silence, start to unravel
into the mist — their white arms slowing,
then gone, as if they never were.
The Fitties cottages crouch low
beneath a sky of pewter and fur.
Pleasure Island stands in stillness,
its rides wrapped in winter grey,
the smell of donuts from the donut stall
drifting faintly, then away.
grey as a heron's wing —
the fog horns boom their lonely warning
while the muted bell-buoys ring.
A curlew calls from somewhere unseen,
its cry unravelling into air;
the estuary holds its breath this morning
and seals its grey beneath a prayer.
The wooden groynes stand dark and dripping,
their timbers barnacled and worn,
the tide retreats across the mudflats,
leaving its wrack of sea-grass, torn
netting and the bones of whelks,
a herring gull's abandoned find.
The fog moves in again more thickly,
and leaves the cold shore far behind.
grey as a heron's wing —
the fog horns boom their lonely warning
while the muted bell-buoys ring.
I walked until the pier-head vanished,
until the breakwater was a ghost,
until the only sound was the foghorn
and the cry of the winter coast.
And I thought: this is what endures —
the estuary, the grey, the mist,
long after all our noise has faded
and all our certainties dismissed.