Smithereens Press Chapbooks Atoll by Dylan Brennan | Page 19

The Elephants at Blacksod

Not the weeping river-cows
of the tropics
but exuberant child-giants
splashing the salt
and foam of the Atlantic.
You joined them
gawping back to land
like fools to the spice routes
as the surf flooded mudless
pachyderm crevices
before trickling
to a dark silver you remembered
in the silt and glimmer
of a Greenlandic estuary.
The imagined transformation
of sixteen columnar legs
to plesiosauroid fins
and a submerged head

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