Scarborough Poem

 As we reported earlier, the poem Zaffar Kunial has a poem with plenty of Brontë echoes:

Scarborough

Like Mum, whose middle name was wrongly spelled
on her death certificate as ‘Anne’, your end –
like that still silent e – bothers me. Raised inland
you were haunted by the waves. Anne Brontë.
Quiet as castles, your grave, far from the family
vault, is almost beyond the country, on a limb
by the North Sea. To recover. You’d go out east
to that coast, days from your end – for what? The rub
of salty air? Of a picked up pebble? And there

the sea’s drum, loud and not, perhaps the mother
cancer took early. The rhythm of memory
puts time ahead of itself and we’re pulled to miss
a coast that is not yet home. The tide. It’s an
oxygen machine, still going. Its constant hum.