An aged busker in a stetson sets up
on the river embankment near the café.
He talks at length about his life, then sings
Carole King’s ‘And it’s too late, baby now’.
The weary crowd applauds sporadically.
We walk towards the weir, where brown-tinted
helter-skelter roaring iridescent spume
catches the sunlight. We remember
when the salmon – from the North Atlantic
through the Irish Sea – leapt steps by the weir,
homing upstream in their birth river
to spawn. Industrial effluent released
continually has destroyed that.
A cormorant – one of a gulp that clusters
near the weir – dives, leaving only bubbles,
and emerges, an endangered eel
writhing in its beak.
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By David Selzer