Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
She squints to watch the seagulls
form scattered clouds around a trawler
just past the waves: two pelicans fly in tandem—
closer still, a rookery of cormorants:
swift dark bodies, bold suited for their world of wet.
Yesterday, she told her sons to look away
from the injured one,
flailing in the sand,
that awful terror and try of wings.
Behind her, seaside houses rise up
on delicate stilts. Over the ocean she hears
the noise of men rebuilding roads,
bridges that arch higher, reaching
to connect land to land that will not last—
even the cormorant was dying,
or trying not to,
on a stretch of disappearing sand
between Sound and Sea.
Today, she watches her children
build an ornate, crooked sandcastle,
their father adds flourishes
of engineering, details of seashell.
She knows they drove too far,
for too short a time—
tells herself an old, parental tale:
This, this is what they will remember.
She knows it isn’t only pain and fear
that made that dying bird pulse and struggle—
also instinct, also memory: maybe
the feathered body’s low swoop
through waves crashing, maybe beating wings
of brethren on the seascape, maybe
all those sleek iridescent lives,
each bearing out.
This poem first appeared in in Pirene’s Fountain (2020).
—
Rebecca Brock is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023). In 2022, she won the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest at The Comstock Review and the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. She has been a flight attendant for most of her adult life and is still surprised by this fact. You can find more of her work at www.rebeccabrock.org.
