After the Shark
by Bill Yarrow
after the shark
washed up, a man
with a hammer and a man
with a plank ran yelling
and killed it thirty times
upon the dulling sand
and as its brackish spasms
stopped, the crowd
itself began to itch
itself to have seen
a shark! a shark!
come swimming from the
sea, upon the swarming
land, where the bathers
rife in a basking mass
smiled at death and each
dispersed, each to his
secret dream of the thing
each to personal seething
prey to fey imagining.
I would have thought
the darkness of it
enough to caution
their want of the waves
but they grew again
brave, within minutes
of their fear,
and everyone brazenly
ran back and leapt
oblivious into that sea.
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Author's Note
This poem appeared in Central Park: A Journal of the Arts and Social Theory in 1982.
It was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
It was cited as an Outstanding Poem in Pushcart Prize VIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited Bill Henderson, New York: Avon, 1984.
The poem appears in Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012).
Especially like the opening stanza.
Nice, Bill!
Great poem. I remember how when we were teenagers, my friends and I would watch the movie, Jaws, then see which one of us was brave enough to jump in the water. We all jumped.