Lobster Season In Massachusetts Poem by Seif-Eldeine O

Lobster Season in Massachusetts

My dad puffs on his cigar. In the moonlight, red embers
dance like lady bugs. Concrete and brick flakes escape
Worcester's abandoned structures. My dad's cigar

withers. He turns to ash. Winds of a Nor'easter carry him
to Boston Harbor. Men with no vestige of youth,
not an autumn hair nor a spry knee,

load up the docks. The docks exist because men
need a place to soil their boots and the cranberry bogs
are already taken. From yesterday's shipment of lobster,

their hands are yellow and cracked. Lobster season came
with the storm and left with my father's ashes. Gloucester fishermen
lean over the portside railings and fall into the sea.

Their bodies float to places where the tourists point.
They say 'these men were the ocean."
The lobsters move north along the Atlantic. Not one remains.


this poem was originally published in Chanterelle's Notebook,2012