Playing in the Dunes on Plum Island

  The only life worth living sky-jumps from sand dunes
  with stiff winds blowing off of the Atlantic
  and lands there knee-deep in god.
  This is delta groundwork of the Merrimack.
  Shaman chants and industrial noise
  sweep downstream from Nashua and Lowell.
  The current here is almost measureless.
  My father was a local union president,
  his father, a carpenter from Tignish.
  On the other hand, my mother recollects
  the deafening sounds of power looms;
  her grandfather here from Yorkshire communed
  with ancient native ghosts, precribing
  herbal potions and bloodroot medicines.
  Now my daughter follows our parabolic
  spring and settles in the deep world next to mine.

copyright 1998 Greg Perry