Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Sugar Kelp, by Judith Janoo

 

Sugar Kelp

       Do not go gentle into that good night—Dylan Thomas

 

Sea garden of green lettuces, red mosses,                         

brown ribbons of sugar kelp caterpillared

just below the surface, spooling spores

 

around rope, above tiers of mussels, oysters—

the new farm, where hunger wraps as it grows,

eats poisons of land and air, while an old man’s

 

bent head gives years to a bed, his hopes

to the cove, the return of the herring

folding into flakes of skin, white powder

 

of Gold Bond a daughter applies for him,

keeping him at home, and the caregivers with

bird names, Phoebe and Robyn, who come

 

mornings to wash him as sugar kelp is washed

by the waves, as it washes what the sea has taken

into itself. All Rise, say those who escaped

 

the firing on the beaches of his war laid down

inside him, near-cleansed, near-resigned as new

fishing ground, where no hook, no catch,

 

only soothing of a daughter’s hands, until

she moves his lighter away from the oxygen tank,

and his pipe, his habit of reaching to ignite it.

 

He’s slid down to the foot of the bed, one leg dangling

the rail, blankets bunched beneath him.

“Can you push a little with your feet?” his daughter says.

 

“They don’t work anymore.”

She reminds him fishermen now farm the waters

he’s spent a lifetime minding. “Growing sugar kelp.”

 

“Seaweed,” he says. “Algae. That stuff?”

Letting go of the buoys, his dories, the ocean and its scales.


                                                                    Judith Janoo

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