POEM
A Walk, Ending At The Lobster Pot Restaurant In Blackness
Blackness rises to light,
an early start on the dew of the trails.
Late morning, coming from west
over the slick stones and past drifted woods, stranded bare,
nature full in the senses and the steel-flat sea swelling out
past three bridges
and the lighthouse squatting on
a
lone
rock
to
the
Then a Dutch-ochre-coloured box scuttles over the horizon line,
chased by a castle.
The Lobster Pot.
A memory of reading once about fisher’s children in old-time Canada,
bullied as their sandwiches were thick with lobster tails
and they were teased for being poor,
their families unable to afford
the processed meats from the supermarket.
Then time to feel our fortune as we tread on past mossy ruins,
our children happy on the path, through the scent of the warming wrack.
Nearing, the mind shifts on its sand beds to eating,
hot butter and the forking-out of tails.
Thoughts shift, stop and dive like terns,
dropping to the floor of ink-blue waters.
How many lobsters wait and move silently there,
so patient and strange a wonder
the animals above have named a word for every part:
carapace, cheliped, knuckle, swimerette?
We outlanders have walked and move inland now,
pulled toward the warmth and the promise of full bellies.
Little divides our appetite and the inner fire
that drives a lobster into the creel after the bait.
Things change colour moving from cold to heat.
Inside we eat,
and eat, watched over by bright figureheads, and
emerge with lemony fingers
and a round of glad shouting.
Outside,
Blackness rises to light and
the wind flowing down the fetch of the Forth
suddenly sings the day into peace.
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