This town is a seaside town.
You can feel it in the air
when the haar wraps round.
Smell the salt nip your nose
in the rain lashing down.
Hear the selkie songs of old
in the wind as it howls.

This town is a seaside town-
it feels different in the summer.
Winter is long and bitter
but the minute it gets warmer
Archie’s silvery structures
seem to sparkle in the sun.
The sea’s still hoora freezin’
but the beach is overrun.
Bare chested loons shouting
MON IH DONS!
still cheerful in defeat.
Barbeques rolled out of sheds
when it passes ten degrees.
Happy drunks line Belmont Street
as teens smoke weed atop St. Nicks.
You learn to savour summer
when it passes by
so very quick- though
slowly, slowly, year by year
these dear brief months
get hotter, and we wonder
once we are gone
what will be lost to fire
and floodwater.

This town is a seaside town
grown gassy bloated
and granite tough.
The auld fisher fowk
have long since drowned,
the snarling seas rise
ever more rough.
The rigged up levees
were bound to burst
But the ships still go to work
each day. The fossils
of the fisher fowk
shake their heads and
swear they never lived
so wastefully.

This town is a seaside town
but it is easy to forget when
you’re around the silver city too long
that the golden sands exist.
The culture, like the dunes
along the shoreline, slowly shifts.
We were always close to water.
It was not the waves
which set us adrift.

This town is a seaside town.
We would do well to remember
when the greyfaced ratrace
gets us down and we are feeling
quite untethered- take
a breath. Doctor’s orders:
two muckle lungfuls of briny air.
Cast your eyes to the horizon.
Count the waves that
break out there.