Caught by the River

Five Mile Road, Atlantic Coast

Will Burns | 22nd February 2022

A poem by Will Burns.

Bastardised breakfast of eggs
and whatever else we had to hand,
the morning heavy-pressed 
and failing us as we walk out on the beach.
Crows picking goods out of the seaweed.
Tell it how it used to be—
tractors on the sand, lifting the kelp
to lay on the fields after the potatoes.
Thin soil that needs all the help it can get.
Dogs and dogfish, surf, black backed gulls.
Rough star thistle in the dunes.
Enough to see it nestled here into its island name.
Who cares about our lost parents,
their gardens gone over, their farms bust 
and overgrown, their forest paradise 
sunk somewhere out to sea.