Sea Song

Sea Song

Sea Song

Stood beside a concrete groyne,
something shining, not a coin.
            No – a fish!
From the ocean, motionless, a fish!
Windfall on the ocean wall – a fish!
Homeward bound, two men have found a fish.
They’ll take it home for dinner the next day.
(They found it in the night, I didn’t say.)
On the concrete, by their feet it lay.
They will eat it gratefully, next day.

Thrown out of the teeming tide.
Like a dream with sea inside.
From the sea where it would hide.
Thrown onto a wall beside
the two men walking out; they spied
            a fish!
Scales lit by light of moon, a fish!
The friends stride homeward with their boon – a fish!

What came unexpectedly to the shore
brings to mind experience from long before;
something one of these two men once saw,
a thing of a more ornamental nature
than this gentle beast the sea once bore.

Back in days, now long gone by,
there was a fish, forever dry.
For, from a cracker it had come,
a little plastic simulacrum
which became an oracle
when you put it on your palm.
Maybe not a miracle,
but it possessed a certain festive charm,
the first time that your eyes did see
such a little novelty.
On a boyhood Christmas day,
closely watching for the way
It would curl, or simply stay.
See the piece of plastic play
and give away your days to come
by your adolescent thumb,
little fortune-telling fish.
A see-through and a very thin fish.
Knowing neither ocean, nor a dish.
Quite unlike the one that landed
from the swelling and the swish.

The fortune fish did not foresee
what the men, by moon would see.
Hurled out of the swirling sea,
filling the two men with glee
feeling they found luckily,
a fish.