I love this poem because it is good, so poignant it squeezes the heart
It reminds me of long ago evenings, sitting on the sea wall watching the shrimp boats setting out on their nightly trawl, under an arching sky. Why does the southern sky seem so much higher, the stars so much further away?
And then it also reminds me of Eric Cantona’s stirring denunciation of the scavengers of the press
The pins of the slack pin seine
irregular the horizon; the tide
has gone them bare. A most disturbed
seagull proportions a catch. The fisherman’s
wife, another seagull, leans on the sky
counting shrimp.
Surrendering ourselves
we denizen an epoch of abuse
trying to defy with the seagull’s
or seawife’s similar desperation
the tide that naked skins us.
Shrimp is our number. Is so
we stay. Is a way
of counting born we.
Martin Carter
