Boy on the Beach

Gray skies and seas.
    Red
       Blue
          Black
on the sand.

The image of the boy on the beach summoned
easily and endlessly by the simple mapping of bleak colour
You thought you had steeled yourself for the image.
But your stomach lurches still.
But that is nothing still. There must have been more.
Get ready for the sounds of that less-than-bucolic beach
crude shore of stunned silence and disbelieving wailing,
Brace yourself for a lungful of crisp seaside air
tinged with the scent of despair and the acid mouthful of bile.

These are no tourists
collecting their dead and discarded
dreams of nothing more than to breath another day
gone, all gone,
This is no vacation resort town that mocks
those who would dare
risk that they love the most
to at grab thin threads of a lifeline
only to earn a thousand nights of uneasy rest and
unrelenting dreams of a child's grasp failing in the waves.

It was supposed to be better.