The Gaysh of a Ceirteachán

In floods Ceirt, all barnacle-eyed
with a mussel for a mouth oozing mud,
a ragged tattered soul, dressed in the dregs
of fisher-folk yoked under its gaysh.

A bearded ceirteachán, a prophet of sorts.
Ceirt, a wildly staring husk, a huddled movement
of rags rippling under bladderwrack and plastic bags,
limned in Lethean light, a little washed-up drift.

Half-human, half-sea, the Saint of Waste,
the tidal stench of our rot, our collapse, caught up
in the backwash, reeling to the rend, the remains of us
snagged in ghost nets on England’s friable shores.

Unsunned, we will sit where the sea ends,
pours out its shadows, cold as indomitable stones,
swept along in the slow dance of the here and hereafter,
its great curve brimming in perpetual silence.

The roiling sea, its eternal unfeeling,
its depths like death, this fret a liquescence of pearls
lacing our dewed lashes as we are lost to the haar, adrift,
our last words the verse of drowning.

Yet, how the blood shudders with life,
this dream of continued existence, beyond this isle
and the next, an ocean of possibilities. But under the spell
of a ceirteachán, our fate is the dark sea bed.