Someone’s doing archaeology in the sand again
digging up old saltworks, a meeting house,
taverns with motels on top.
With little brushes, they reveal the bones
of stranded pilot whales:
The stench must have hung for months,
the things-that-feast-on-whales rejoicing,
raccoons and gulls and clouds of flies,
stockpiling fat for later.

The swarms of people who’ve made claim
to lands that wash away
are biomass beneath the smiling skulls
and weeping willows.
Even the gravestones food to crustose
lichens otherwise occupied with trees
and clapboard walls,
everything graying like the weather,
books in the library all warped from humidity.
History, I guess,
though quite a lot is missing.

It’s strange the beach is playground
for a sort of whitewashed wealth:
The quaint names, the clean homes,
blue-green polo shirts on the golf course.
A diversified portfolio of real estate for all
seasons and climate crises.

But the truth is, it’s hurricanes
and wreckage and wrack,
ghosts of widows,
Friends and witches hiding in the forest,
creatures barely surviving,
decay. The transcendent beauty
of one thing eating another.

Sarah B. Cahalan (she/her) writes about natural history, hope/grief/faith, the layers of places and how those correspond with our own layers as people moving through time and place. She has poems, current or forthcoming, in The Shore; the tide rises, the tide falls; Pinhole Poetry; Solum; and U. S. Catholic. Sarah is from Massachusetts and is currently based in Dayton, Ohio.