I started drawing on my childhood memories to write haiku.
In the summertime we used to go to a beach not far from where I still live. We came onto the beach through a wide expanse of flat grey dune, surrounded by the typical soft tones of the ground-hugging vegetation except for a path of clear sand opened by years and years of beach-goers passing through. Then we came to the primary dune, a steep wall of sand crowned with wispy tufts of beach grasses separating the grey dune behind it from the beach proper:
marram grass and madder climbing on hands and knees over the sliding sand
Many years later I returned to that same beach and was surprised that the dune didn’t seem as tall as before. The dune had gotten smaller, or me bigger, or both. When I was a child, the dune looked like it was ten metres tall. It was an effort to climb it, aided only by planks of wood placed at even spaces in the dune as steps of sorts. These planks, too thick to be ordinary wood boards and too regular to be driftwood or some other sort of discarded wood, were clearly railway sleepers. At the time there were a lot of railway lines being decommissioned, and even as children we were familiar with sleepers, for we regularly used the out-of-use tracks as shortcuts in our childhood hikes and bike rides:
sleepers in the sand there’s no one to shelter from the north wind
