Turning Seven at Mor Glas Cottage

A bookcase packed with faded nature guides:

Sharks of the British Seas, ink sketches

of dogfish & porbeagle in profile,

The Collins Guide to Fossil Hunting,

thin, splayed fingers of prehistoric ferns.

A family in strange silence, listening

to the hum of rock, travelling clock of ball

against cricket bat. The smell of fresh paint,

flowers, &, faintly, of other people – past guests.

& my new half brother & my father

speaking German on the patio at night.

From my window: glow of their cigarettes

like distant harbour lights.

This was their lost world: my father’s past;

my discovery, at least, of its textures, ribs

of Jurassic bracken, & the ammonite

my half brother gave me for a birthday

present, one housed in plastic he’d bought

from a local gift shop. Because we’d failed

to find our own. All we’d found was insects,

or, as he called them, for he didn’t know

the word: Animals.

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Then my mother hunting for the source

of a draft my father couldn’t feel

while I counted currency of sea-glass,

handed her those salt-washed jewels,

as if to buy her peace. He & she on the patio

with the watermelon I smashed against the stones

when their shouting matched the sea.

& now my half brother & I listening to the roar

of the present: a bedroom door slammed shut.

Screaming wind over solid slate cliffs.