Host

Grey silhouette of screeching gull

soars startled into flight;

First glitter on a foreign shore,

Behold the coming night.

 

Old fisherman alone, cocooned,

baring weathered flesh;

Rests his line on steady frame,

Sits picking at his net.

 

The distant hills grow dim, then dark,

Lie silently to rest;

Their form against the setting sun

a man’s recumbent breast.

 

His breath the gently smoking filth

exhaled from industry,

His hair a golden lion’s mane

swept by a spoiled sea.

 

Bathed in the waves a plastic plague

floats, hidden from his eye,

Consumed then doomed to limbo;

vague and deathly rolling by.

 

Now, one by one the lights appear

along the bony coast,

their brightness sucked from deep within

the body of their host.