Poem of the Week: Humpback

Our daughter’s world, her library books
of dolphin, seal and whale, led us
one summer upstairs to sleep
on futons in an A-frame open-plan bedroom

overlooking grassy shores of the St Lawrence
above Saguenay. In our ears, McCartney
singing Let It Be, and Dylan, The Times
They Are A -Changin’, our son played

from a pink vinyl LP, harmonica echoing
through the house. The water spread grey
and sheer, like an inland sea to another country.
We took to the waves in long yellow canoes,

precipitous as stilettoes on ice that bore us high
on mirrored clouds, like gliding on the palm
of a god coasting North and East,
towards the faraway mouth of the estuary.

When our guide, yards ahead hollered,
‘Hey!’ and pointed mid-river, paddles idled.
We listened to the tide wash a barnacled island,
soon become rolling flank, a water wheel

shedding streams, fluke towering before
it swept into the swallowing ocean
leaving us yaw rudderless, like Jonah
staring down the barrel of the rising deep.

Catherine Phil MacCarthy has published five collections of poetry including Daughters of the House (2019), and The Invisible Threshold (2012) short-listed for the Irish Times / Poetry Now Prize, both with Dedalus Press Dublin. She received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry in 2014