People Try to Get a Photo of the Supermoon Rising Above a Small Seaside Town

We find ourselves here accidentally, walking the dog, 

in a sudden forest of tripods slipping around on the pier, 

each pivoting a chunky camera with a zoom lens. 

This moon moves fast, as if it’s in a silent film,

as the gulls glide unimpressed, 

and people tighten their coats around 

them like winding sheets.

They are all waiting for the moment that the moon manoeuvres 

over the lighthouse that’s about to flash out 

the first of the night’s warnings

 — a super composition —

and then, they can swivel round for the last of the sunset’s shining,

two shots for-the-price-of-one, two very shareable assets.

Driving down the coast, we spot other people on the dunes, 

charcoal-line figures smudging in the dusk 

with their phones held out landscape-style, 

all reaching to catch an image of something 

so beautiful that just won’t last. 

Ali Rowland won the inaugural Hexham poetry competition in 2023. Her poems have been included in Dreich, Orbis and The Frogmore Papers, and other literary magazines, and in a number of anthologies including Tabula Rasa: Poems by Women (Linen Press) and Ten Poems of Kindness (Candlestick Press). Her poetry collections Rooted (Maplestreet Press) and Dragged Up: A Northern Childhood (Sixty Odd Poets) were published in 2024. She is a member of Amble Writers group, and is working on a new collection of poems set in a small seaside town.