Milton Ehrlich’s most recent poem to appear here was “Father Doesn’t Always Know Best” (November 2017).

Jim
By Milton Ehrlich

Billowing winds on St. Mary’s Bay
can’t budge the blue herons,
solitary sentinels eyeballing minnows
skittering along in a falling tide.
Terns tiptoe around clusters of razor clams.
A flight of piping plovers erupts in flight,
screeching snow-white seagulls chase the fleet
as it heads for port under a milky blue sky,
bloated with mackerel, herring, pollack, and cod.

They don’t make them like Jim anymore.
Sea and salt were in his bones.
With sinewy arms and the patience of a monk
he never tired of hauling traps, anchors and nets.
He could read the wind like a fortune teller
or pick up the scent of an incoming storm.
Hard as a manyard plate, sturdy as a red oak mizzen mast,
descended from William of Orange, from the old country
where the famine caused them all to flee.
When mother gave out after her thirteenth babe,
he was sent up to Yellowknife in sub-zero temps,
to earn a dollar a day so the rosy-cheeked children
would have milk on their breath.

With hunger, patriotism, and the threat of war,
he signed up with the Nova Scotia Highlanders.
Blood-drenched seaweed and body parts
swept him on to the Normandy beach.
Ambushed by a Panzer division, he was
locked in a camp ‘til the end of the war.
Bagpipes were playing when he came home
carried on a stretcher more dead than alive.
Never to forget his comrades in arms,
went to their reunion every year,
built his own house with a pick and a shovel,
raised a proud brood of his own.

As old age and angina slowed him down
he rested in his “building”
made out of scrounged pylons from abandoned piers,
sat on a truck seat, rescued from his treasured dump
replaced now by the recycling scheme.

“How goes the battle?” his unvarying greeting
as he harangued about the “lying sons of whores,”
politicos of the day.
Now laid to rest he won’t be catching fish anymore.
His spirit rides the tides of the bay, the battle finally won.