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The Barry Seawall Wonder.
I heard it first on the radio whilst shaving
The stubborn post bank holiday stubble
Was mirrored on my tongue
But the news delivered so glibly,
Told me that something was very wrong:
"Reports are coming in of a Tsunami in the Bristol Channel……."
A vision flashed before my eyes,
Chepstow devastated.
The Clifton Gorge choked with broken ships
And the bodies of the countless dead.
I dropped my razor and headed for the T.V.
The breaking news banner ticked across the screen,
But the news was slow in coming.
Everyone had time to draw their own conclusions,
As the helicam began sending.
The newsroom staff were all lost for words!
All were astounded by the unfolding action, or rather, by the inaction.
A graceful, vertical wall of water, eight miles long,
From the shore at Rhoose to the headland before Penarth,
Stood motionless on the wet sands and the coal tailings.
I'd never seen anything like it!
Myriad theories formed: a Fata Morgana,
Some really saw the hand of Morgan, Merlin or Rhiannon,
Biblical, supernatural, a gravitational anomaly, the seventh seal broken, Jormundgand,
Poseidon's hand, the return of the Titans, the Kraken, the Behemoth, Leviathan.
The world's press ran amok with wild theories.
A Royal Commission was convened, in the best Hotel in Cardiff
Quail's eggs and Caviar served with a sea of chilled Bollinger.
They flirted with young staff members and enjoyed helicopter forays above the standing surf.
After a week, without a conclusion, they took a private charter,
To seek similar phenomena on the warmer beaches of the Indian Ocean.
The wall of water remained, green and gleaming, rising and falling with every tide,
Forty nine feet high on the spring flood, but never moving.
I visited Barry the following week, to see it for myself.
A lively mob stood at the base of the wall, cameras snapping.
The battery was flat in mine.
A small boy with a wheel barrow collected the hapless fish which swam through the wall,
To fall flopping and flapping onto the dry and now stinking sea bed.
The only barrier force the scientists ever detected,
Was the normal surface tension of cold brine.
In the end they couldn't explain it, so they just ignored it.
While I was there two divers swam up and simply stepped through the wall, they were almost dry.
It was impressive, standing with my nose touching the towering ice cold sea,
I peered at a pollock, two feet away and at the keel of a boat where I should have seen the sky.
Clutched tightly in my sweaty agnostic palm, was my wife's red coral rosary.
I was completely stumped by it all.
A young Irish barman in the Myn Y Don finally made sense of it,
As he served stale sandwiches and warm beer to a nonplussed hack:
"The Tide lingered around Barry Island" he said "as the spring flood began to slack
and like any rational tourist, It is never coming back!"
