Salute The Magpie by John Barrett Lee
I try to picture you in old age, your black beard bristled silver. Near Druidstone Beach, we sit on our bench, the wood salt-bleached and time-worn. Its lichen flakes at the lightest touch, and we watch the August sunlight fade beyond the ancient drystone wall.
I imagine us with a bag of beers at our feet. The silence is as easy as the tide below. There’s a rhythm in how we move, catch each other’s eye—our flaws long known but smoothed now like pebbles in the tide. You joke about grockles who drive too fast, never pulling over, never saluting the magpie. I roll my eyes—do others note the way our laughter swells like waves breaking onto the shore.
The sun drifts west of Skomer’s outline, shedding golden light across the water. We grill the sea-slick mackerel fished from a secret mark, passed down from father to son, our fingers shiny with oil, eyes stinging from charcoal smoke. You bring out a jar of home-pickled onions, sharp and hot in malt vinegar.
I want to hold that picture. It ebbs away.
You never made it. And now the only image I can summon is you laid out in a wooden box at Druidstone. Your skin is cold as bladderwrack; your black beard pearled from the mortuary fridge like frost on sea grass.
From the ancient wall, the magpie takes flight into the fading autumn sky.
John Barrett Lee is a writer from Pembrokeshire, now based in Ho Chi Minh City, where he has lived for many years with his Welsh-Vietnamese family. He is Head of English as an Additional Language at the British International School. He studied Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, where he was taught by author Robert Nisbet and poets Sheenagh Pugh and Tony Curtis, before going on to complete a PGCE and an MA in English Language Teaching.
Artwork by Tom Smith
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