Foam flowers

Col and I walked along the front to the little pier today.   The wind was icy, the Channel was raging and there were foam flowers everywhere.  Two lines of poetry came to mind.  One, from an Anne Sexton poem (The Truth the Dead Know), is:
"The wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water".

The other is from Swinburne's "A Forsaken Garden", a poem which always makes me think of my young parents in Cornwall, just after their engagement.


"Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,"
 Did he whisper?   "look forth from the flowers to the sea;
 For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
 And men that love lightly may die - but we?"

They did die. But the foam flowers were all over the beach this afternoon.