Chalk & Channel Way
The Chalk & Channel Way is a walking and cycling trail between Dover and Folkestone, along the National Cycle Route No 2.
A series of art works have been installed along the route; a free leaflet is available from White Cliffs Countryside Partnership (01304 241806) or you can download the leaflet by clicking on the download to your right.
The art works are all pictured to your right in the order you will see them if you travel from Folkestone to Dover.
Creteway Down, Folkestone
Coccoliths by Tim Clapcott (pictured) (2000) (further information from WCCP)
Poem No 1 Blind Date by Ros Barber (pictured)
Battle of Britain Memorial, Capel-le-Ferne
Battlle of Britain pilot (pictured) by Harry Gray (1993) (further information from www.harrygray.co.uk)
Poem No2 Battle of Britain Memorial by Ros Barber
Cliff Top Cafe, Capel-le-Ferne
Poem No 3 Cliff Top Cafe by Ros Barber
Abbott's Cliff, Capel-le-Ferne
Poem No 4 Soup by Ros Barber
Sound Mirror, Abbott's Cliff
Sound Mirror (pictured) Built 1928 (further information from WCCP)
Poem No 5 Listening Ear by Ros Barber
Milepost (pictured) by John Mills (further information from www.sustrans.org.uk/default.asp?sID=1132763167625)
Flora Calcarea (book with early spider orchid) (pictured) by Rob Kesseler (further information from www.robkesseler.co.uk)
Seat (pictured) by Rob Kesseler
Lydden Spout
Flora Calcarea - Nottingham catchfly (pictured) by Rob Kesseler
Flora Calcarea - Knapweed (pictured) by Rob Kesseler
Seat by Rob Kesseler
Round Down
Flora Calcarea - by Rob Kesseler
Flora Calcarea - by Rob Kesseler
Poem No 6 Gorse by Ros Barber
Samphire Hoe
Stepping Stones by Tim Clapcott (pictured)
Samphire Hoe furniture by Mark Folds (pictured) (1995) (further information from www.folds.co.uk)
Samphire Tower by Jony Easterby (pictured) (2004) (further information from www.jonyeasterby.co.uk)
Poem No 7 Samphire Hoe by Ros Barber
Shakespeare Cliff
Poem No 8 Shakspeare Cliff by Ros Barber
Poem No 9 Porous by Ros Barber
Poem No 10 Above Dover by Ros Barber
North Downs seat (unknown artist|)
Dover
On the crest of a wave - sculpture by Ray Smith (1995|)
The ten new poems by Ros Barber are as follows. You can hear the poet read the poems by clicking on the files in the Cycling / chalk & Channel Way page.
www.whitecliffscountryside.org.uk/index.php?id_sec=86&id_sub=5
You can learn more about the poet on her web site www.rosbarber.com
CHALK LINES By Ros Barber
Poem 1 Blind Date
Here, the creature you dreamt
while your blood was sleeping.
I am half bone, and half the other thing,
that part of you
you won’t own up to.
As long as you like, I have been here
under your feet,
and as long as you like
I’ll stay.
Perhaps.
The best of me I have hidden away
from the music
that drifts from the dance,
in a place that none but the locals
know how to pronounce.
You cannot imagine
what I am about to say to you.
I am astounding.
I am nothing
like my sisters.
Poem 2
Here, a human being has turned to stone.
Wingless, stony flying hat in hand,
not a breath stirring the stone of his collar
and his stony face untroubled by expression.
Blank; not waiting for some hum on the horizon
not grieving, cursing or remembering
but unwritten as he tries to wear all feelings,
from the cheery Tally Ho to Seek and Destroy.
He surfaces from these mottos vast
and empty. And green. As though Nature
couldn’t resist colouring this featureless creature
with a shade that makes him even less human.
Even harder to picture
lying awake at night with the ack-ack fire;
the sky groaning with bombers, their dull tons
heading for his wife in
Perhaps he is better seen from the air;
understood suddenly, briefly,
like the sound that comes from a mile away
but is your own skull exploding.
Or distantly, theoretically, like the pencil mark
of a place a bomb must fall.
Until the last minute, stay above the cloud line.
Set imagination to zero as the bomb doors open.
Keep five to ten thousand clear of emotion.
Too close – see the wiped faces.
Poem 3 Cliff Top Café
Here, the cliff top café has succumbed
to being munched itself. The gravity
of its exposed position has listed the list
of ‘teacake, crumpet, butter extra’ (crumbs)
and its concrete anguish hovers in between
ideas of things that do and don’t exist.
It’s life and death now on the seaward terrace
where formerly tea and coffee were the thing,
and choice of ice cream pales against the bleak
yes/no of whether where we might sit will perish.
There’s a crack all the way around. The shell is split,
an oyster prized apart by winter’s beak.
It’s rain that unglues this place: saliva-thick
it unstitches the turf, bloats earth, and wears out rock
until rock is done with holding the whole world up
and drops. The shapes of things reverse. One lick
from the sea and we’ll forget what this was. What?
A piece of wall. The bone of an animal. Dust.
Poem 4 Soup
Here, the sea is milk. A fishy milk, a cold
bouillabaisse of chalk and fin, served on a clatter
of stone. Within its clouded vision, cod fatten,
mackerel cut with their zig-zags through the fog
like children dawdling to a school that has disappeared
and may not, they pray, be there when the whiteness clears.
These cliff are temporary. Reduced and solid,
born from warm, tropical broth of stock
and stored in a stack above, a solid block
now broken off in chunks and re-dissolved
in the cooler, less forgiving froth
of this liquid finger from the North.
So life revolves. We, too, are soup.
Temporarily solid vats of DNA
fleshed out just long to find a mate
with whom to create a different brew.
We dawdle through the fog. Circling above:
vagrants and migrants, the murderous cries of gulls.
Poem 5 Listening Ear
Here, I am listening.
Once precisely engineered
and now, cracked to my aggregate:
I can still hear
everything.
Grass rubbing the air.
Ten yards away, a tiger beetle
sausaging eggs from its rear. Someone’s name
in the next town, tossed up like a coin.
Your shoes, breathing.
See the horizon?
I can hear that fold of sea
all the way to
tune my sense to the precise note
of a single shell that rattles under its flop.
And each thing, being listened to,
listens back.
A dark bedroom, an imagined step –
each thing, being listened to,
hushes.
The wind drops.
A dandelion resists the urge to seed,
cradles the huge sound of its genes leaving.
A mussel unfurling its oily foot towards a groyne
plays dead.
A woman breaking bread in St Nazaire
stills herself with a sixth sense.
I burrow beneath her held breath,
seek the constriction of fibres in her chest,
their lock trembling high as a telephone wire.
Yes, I can hear everything,
and I assure you, everything is quiet as the grave.
But put your ear to mine and you will hear
the molecular stretch of lichen growing
cell by cell.
Poem 6 Gorse
Here, gorse slanders the countryside:
fierce with hypodermics and fleshed
the bright yellow of a bruise’s edge,
its sharp, shelterless heart no break
for the wind, and all spiked it is
but oh, so yellow, the yellow
of birdsong bursting from the chest
and the yellow of all of spring, all year
as it flowers and flowers, all year
still yellow, raging yellow like a love
that won’t die down, a love splits
you apart and finds you, mollusc-soft
in your mouth, the you that was always
afraid before but wanted to flower, and flower,
relentlessly yellow, unstoppable.
Poem 7 Samphire Hoe
Here, the Earth is inside out:
drilled from the belly of the
and carted here in miserable truckloads;
tons and tons of it, bulldozed, and left for dead.
But beneath chalk marl’s unpromising
grey nudity, the tick of life recovers.
A gull preens a single seed out of a feather.
Spores alight from the long haul of a gale.
Things grow. Leaves sprout, and the first flowers
burst in the air like astonishment.
It’s a fierce soil they grow in, these pioneers,
but their roots fix Nitrogen into its teeth, and tame it.
Slowly, slowly, but faster than you would imagine,
The land heals like a bruise,
colouring differently season by season,
and dresses itself, under the glare of the weather.
Now, it is rich. Sea beet, samphire, kidney vetch,
and the early spider orchid, supposedly only found
in ancient fields. It’s all a lie. Here’s the proof
Nature, like Love, celebrates the new.
My love. My love, be what you are inside.
Pull your substance, rough as it is, from your dark heart
and spread it out under the sun.
Let people see. Let rain fall, and know: miracles come.
Poem 8 Shakespeare Cliff
Here’s a good place to go mad.
There’s nothing but gravity.
Let’s dress ourselves in flowers
and talk nonsense.
Let’s find our blind fathers,
pretend we don’t know them,
talk in piratical accents, disown them.
Let’s end it all –
throw ourselves into the air
some way from the edge
and wonder at ourselves
unbroken. Let’s not
look down.
Poem 9 Porous
Here, rain slips into rock as comfortably as a woman
sheathes herself in silk – the slight tightness of the one
eased by other’s slatternly loveliness and the laws
of likelihood loosening like the knot around a lover’s craw.
All rain falls – the drizzle, the torrential, the stuff
that insinuates, tadpole-fat, between collar and scruff –
to find acceptance in this rock and layer by layer
slip through the lasting digests of prehistory.
Chalk is in a constant state of thirst, and yet
lets go. Rain falls through almost as though it’s met
a different kind of air: a slower, heavier atmosphere,
through which to drop and meet the sea below. Here,
acceptance is the law. And a person might, observing this,
despite a dryness in the throat, send up a wish
that the human heart might be so porous,
and absorb all that the heavens rain down on us.
Poem 10 Above
Here, goodbyes rise on the air like gulls,
like handkerchiefs waved from railings of liners,
like kisses blown and sea-spit spattering the face
of the lone walker slogging the beach below.
Along the slough of tideline, they seed and settle,
rooting against the rough policing of the wind
and passing it over their heads like baggage, like buckets
of water to quell the heat of what has gone.
An indigenous species, they clump and cling to the earth
or launch in colonies, both animated, and rooted firm.
Their habit, by turns, is low and sprawling, salt resistant;
or feathered, rapacious, garrulous and soaring.
Leave them here. They will thrive in the thin grass,
the crumbling edge, the bluff air. In winter they will shed
their sorry tear-shaped petals, their black head.
Come and collect them back when you are done.
