“Ashore” by Ernest Hilbert
The harpooned great white shark heaves onto sand,
Nudged by waves, red cavern of dripping teeth.
A crowd comes. Loud gulls wreathe the booming mist.
Blue flies cloud the fishy sunset, and land.
One, sated, is slapped to a smear beneath
A child’s quick hand and then flicked from his wrist.
Compass and munitions are sunk with skulls
In wrecks beneath old storms, glass angels
And hourglasses, flint of sunlight through motes,
Violence of slit sails, drowned crews, split hulls,
Quiet draw of dust, too, and all that it pulls,
The slow leak and loss of each thing that floats—
Flail and wild eye, flecked spit of crippled horse,
Crust of diamonds on the throat of a corpse.
2 Comments
Herman Asarnow writes in:
Just received my copy of the new Yale Review and, in it, your poem “Ashore.” It took off for me when the child slapped and flicked the fly off of his arm, but then the poem laid on the Gs as it soared with the next line into a rare, clear, and blue stratosphere of sound and sense both condensed and expansive. Congratulations on such a fine sonnet! It’s one I’ll share, with friends and with students. It begins so simply, but then imagination and language take hold with force.
[…] “Ashore” originally appeared in the Yale Review, reposted at E-Verse […]