If we imagine ourselves one centimetre tall, how terrifying the shore creatures would be! What variety is here, adapted to life between the tides. The poem below is one of my earliest, and perhaps my most awful. Smile at the ideas, though.

SEA MONSTERS

The great sea-monsters of nightmare and legend
Vanish, in a puff of reality.
No sea-dragons writhing, just friendly, threatened
Whales, whose hunting was history;

But the tiny terrors at the water’s edge
Are monsters we take for granted.
Have you studied them in the fringe
Of seaweed, dark forests! Enchanted!

Soft lives in armour, monopods, bivalves:
A world of feeding feet:
The foot-mouths graze under the waves,
Ravenous after drought and heat.

Anemones wave their tentacles.
Nothing can escape their clutches.
Other horrors extrude their stomachs
To surround their prey, ingest their lunches.

Starfish, cucumbers, zany frilled worms,
Hermit crabs in borrowed homes;
Things we can’t see, betrayed by the squirms
Of sand where the clear ripple foams;

Sea-urchins, sucking octopi,
-- Mini-sized, round Britain’s coast –
Drilling oyster-catchers, menace from the sky;
Lurking lobsters; Horror, the most!

The crab waves his eyes and sidles past
Like a drunk, with evil intent.
The vicious nippers will grab on fast,
Then scurry away; find a dent

Under the rocks, to ambush and plunder
Guzzling food as it passes.
Cool camouflage: dark green shell, hiding under
Dark green seaweed; fool the nature classes!

Don’t forget the terrors of this world of monsters,
As you drop your hoard in a bucket.
Be grateful for the nightmare reduced to funsters,
Cut down to size, so you can take it.

Keep a sense of humour, to help you see,
Even in the nightmare, God’s mastery.