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No longer just a home for
seals or stage for birds,
the sea wakes up, lifts white hands and shatters
it’s own stretching fingers against the stone
harbour walls that circle little fishing boats.
Sailors had special words for certain things
to step carefully around bad luck—you didn’t say
minister, you said man in a black coat.
Ninety years ago, here in Arbroath, Scotland,
my Nana was born—and in the twenty-six years
I’d know her I would never ask her about it.
Three hundred years ago, the sea beat the harbour,
carried great horns of wind that tore it apart.
It was just yesterday to the sea, the last time
it noticed this pretty little town, and at the same
time, remembered every wave is a muscle.
Now I stand in my own beginning, the spot on the map
where the line begins, and maybe for the first time
this place sees me too, the air forced around me.
If only I could know how it judges me,
not so much the town, but that one great body—the sea.
Man
in a Black Coat
by Alex Boyd
from: Brick and
Bone,
©2004
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