Shark Bait
This week is “Shark Week” on Poets.org, in partnership with the Discovery Channel. I liked the following poem, with a Great White beached, unsharked, you might say, for what is a shark without an ocean? Offal.
Ashore
by Ernest Hilbert
The harpooned great white shark heaves onto sand,
Nudged by waves, red cavern of dripping teeth.
A crowd comes. Loud gulls wreathe the booming mist.
Blue flies cloud the fishy sunset, and land.
One, sated, is slapped to a smear beneath
A child’s quick hand and then flicked from his wrist.
Compass and munitions are sunk with skulls
In wrecks beneath old storms, glass angels
And hourglasses, flint of sunlight through motes,
Violence of slit sails, drowned crews, split hulls,
Quiet draw of dust, too, and all that it pulls,
The slow leak and loss of each thing that floats—
Flail and wild eye, flecked spit of crippled horse,
Crust of diamonds on the throat of a corpse.
First published in the Yale Review. Copyright © 2009 by Ernest Hilbert.
