Idlers wander beaches
sun gatherers
beachcombers
snapping photos
photos not taken
One:
Saddleback gulls and whobbies pitch, lift
above Pea Isle: a beach gate post holding
sprigs of wild peas,
and pale green rosettes of hop clover
sometimes picked for Gran’s barm
to rise her bread to raise her children,
who heard this admonition like a prayer:
“Don’t go in the boats; don’t go on the water.
Get an education.”
As if an education could only be found on land.
Two:
Fishers stirring steaming barking pots,
lifting their heads to call across calm waters:
Jacob from Kennedys’ stage
to Don from Lears Cove stage
calling to Uncle Esau on Porters’ Beach …
chatter on sea-scented air from tellers to passers-on
along the stretch of one beach
past the rock fences of another,
passing time as their twine nets dye a rich brown
to run through blue waters,
each fisher holding hopes of
nets alive in the swim of white-bellied, pied-backed cod.
Three:
Mary on Little Harbour Beach wringing her hands,
easterly wind sweeping stones into the air,
she waiting for The Coffin,
she waiting for The Coffin,
late in bringing Christopher home.
And then
the eighteen-foot punt running in on the beach with a mad sea,
Christopher too full of salt water
to eat hours-old, pastry-covered cod tongues.
Four:
Christopher and Mary on a stagehead,
its wooden legs in knuckles of rocks
rising out of the beach,
Christopher, looking at his wife up to her ankles in gurry,
seeing tightened lips, pained face, he asking,
“Don’t you think you should be getting up to bed?”
Mary’s feet making heavy marks,
she moving in slow tread up Beach Path.
He, waiting in dread, remembering other times:
beach rocks under the stage holding drops
of a mother’s blood: hieroglyphics of sorrow
for a life begun and lost.
from the house above the beach,
he hears the midwife call:
“Another son, another daughter.”
He answers in smiles caught in
a spill of joyful tears.
Five:
The beach, a treasure trove of childhood …
Children, spin-drift in their hair,
hop-skipping beach rocks,
gathering barnacles and glass, wearied by stones
into new shapes,
bare feet pressing prints in sand.
The ocean’s tongues of wind and tides lick them away.
Children, lifting glad eyes to their father’s skiff plowing home,
gunnels and prow low,
running, lively calls reaching their busy mother’s ears,
“A load of fish!”
Their mother’s glad look,
a whisper off her lips: “Money!”
Six:
Uncle Esau slurping rendered cod-liver oil
from wooden casks,
turning his white moustache yellow with its golden cure.
On Guy Fawkes, night,
those casks, stage strouters, and old flats,
are dragged from stages on the beach to high cliffs
above the dark, dank mouth of sea
moaning against laughter rising with the lick of flames
on a cold, dark sky:
young Byron running through the dying embers,
tripping in a metal hoop …
Other children crying,
running away.
Seven:
Wilf trips up in his nets,
falls into the steaming bark pot,
his scream, cutting through onlookers’ minds,
as sharp as any knife,
the fisher cooked outside, cold inside forever more,
deaf to the screeches of his wife,
blind to the white faces of his children
as they run across the beach.
Eight:
Past pathways close up like sea behind a skiff ’s cut
in the dance of winds and tides
a wispy, white backbone bides,
telling the tale of green-grey waves of caplin
spawning on beaches,
beside mermaids’ purses, their coins spent,
silver dollars not spent,
and only an old-timer to murmur,
like wind whispering through grass,
“I niver t’ought I’d see der day when
‘Baiches’ waus as naked ef fishermen as a sae-licked rock.”