Apples were never that sexy!

In full flight, running by the sea,
leaping ancient groynes like an immortal,
I've almost landed on them -
Adam and Eve on holiday.
They have been soaking up the sun, are sprawled,
half-buried in the sand -
and this, before they've eaten any fruit.
His arm round her
and hers round him, two arms
like serpents slithering together
and showing by example
how to - or not to - enjoy sex.

The Eden Method : Lesson 1.
(So what the apple taught them later on
was something other than we'd thought.)

Change of focus:
just below their feet,
the tree, the famous tree,
the knowledge-of-good-and-evil tree
with every fruit of every kind displayed
(a supermarket range) to say
that every form of good and type of evil
will be included in the deal.

The sea is almost on them and will soon
be washing them away - as if they cared!
Six hundred years might vanish in a day -
should they be bovvered? Not a bit!

Strange to see them wet and steaming in the sun
as if they have been skinny dipping in the waves.
Some wag has threaded sea wrack,
green and brown, between their thighs,
along their sensual contours,
and then - the whole point of the exercise, no doubt -
in buns to hide the nakedness of their pudenda.
(And furthermore, of all such pubic hair
as they possess at such an early adolescent stage.)

A stone's throw out to sea
the falling remnants
of the rest of Eden crumble
sand to sand and flotsam bits
back to the sea to float away;
then further up the beach, below the bathing huts,
a vision of their family some twenty decades on:
their sons and daughters, more experienced by now,
have found the joy -
enough to populate the world.

Then all is gone.
So what remains? A trace of memory?
A golden apple, aptly won:
This week's "Sand Sculpture of the Beach".