TE23 Double Feature

Gaia Warnings

Philip Burton

Raven in the Margin Hraefnes Geat ... Raven’s Gap ... Ramsgate I look for traces, floated feathers, clay-pipe bones, outline of a razor clam. Each day the tide sets out its wares. One raven has left a bone — an ilium — long hidden, now exhumed, eased from time-sifted sands to a cartwheel life, shifted by storms, thinned and cleaned of unkindness. Here’s Sybil, a fishwife, with a raven so tame it’s absurd. Syb’s last of a line of women — piercers, toppers and gutters of herring — who fed, age after age, raven and seabird. Industry triggered a fish glue works’ sulphurous whiffs, plumes of ammonia, quicklime in white heaps, coal from Dover, sand to make glass from washing soda. 112

No More, says the feathered beast, will the tides rinse as clean as you suppose. The fish are dead, my family up and gone. The sea feeds on your conspiracies.

113