Smithereens Press Chapbooks SP14 - The Lighthouses by Daragh Breen | Page 19

Bull Rock; 1889, 83 metres, white flash every 15 seconds
Calf Rock; 1866, destroyed by a storm 27th Nov. 1881

Throughout the day, a winter’s ghost moon
can be seen low in the sky
like a sea-chalked buoy waiting
for the tide of night
to give it substance.
A forgotten wall of lobster-pots remains stacked along a pier,
their wooden frames covered in a mesh of patched blue
and orange rope-work, a cobwebbing of fraying lichens.
Solitary trees bend their ragged manes
into the wind and weep for the fishermen
lost amongst the rocks a ghost’s whisper away.
The rain begins to move in off the sea,
beaded to the wind like an armour,
the brown mountains have random patches of snow,
like moulting seal-pups, their old slopes leak white
rushes of water like stigmata,
Their hinterland is pocked with the cairns
in which the winter sun sets daily,
trailing fading light across the moist ground
just as the ghost snail drags the shadow
of the salt that killed him.

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