In The Combers

In the combers by the seaside,
rocky blasted busted rocks.
Ground hugging lichen likens

to

our daily white-fingered grip upon the shore,
limpets in the flora dripping.

On mineral outcrop broken daily by the waves,
we impotently view the plumes of freedom breathing.
Their force much too great to pleasure us here,
the poor insipid nature of their lost home.

Cows returned.

Once upon a day they slid back into the sea
and formed the whales which now roam the seas

and are smarter than we.

Once cows, I'm told, they no longer belong
on shore. Don't belong to us any more.

And yet we kill. Casting the harpoon for dogfood's
bleeding hump, oil reduced from blubber boiled, in
barrels to make eyeblush.

In the combers lost, in the catacombs of waves
we stand the shoreline watch and wish for flippered
freedom's song.

Where we don't belong.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner