Cairns Edge

The beach gathers its dead. Thousands of horseshoe crabs come home on the full moon’s tide. Their courting dances, scrawled with claw and carapace in the wet sand, leave with the ghost hands of nursing Autumn wave. Their nests of jewel-colored eggs, covered and soothed seasoned in salt sea, gestate beneath a slurry of debris. Right side up each skin colored husk with its barbed tail rocks in the bubbling broth of Cape Cod’s bay. Belly up, they appear as an open invitation to the plovers who flock overhead and arrow down en masse to dine. Piping plovers, masked in black, hopscotch through the detritus, connoisseurs of this turquois egg-like caviar. Among the life and death of sea we walk, barefoot, and cautious wary of the scramble, the jutting barbs, the bits of un-soothed glass, the desecrated cairn which barricades the dying life from the living sea. Published First in Sounding Review 2015