Page 18 - WTP Vol. V #5

9
At Dinas Dinlle
It was at Dinas Dinlle where the sea sweeps east
to explode around Snowdonia
and away west again towards Anglesey’s saner coast that we, in seaweed wigs and ice-cream face packs, hopscotching over the rocks,
found them.
I am ashamed to say we stroked their blotchy bodies.
We may even have prodded and poked at them.
(In our defence, we were very young
and our parents were dredging for themselves in the beachside café’s coffee). Rubbed one way – towards Anglesey – the little creatures were smooth as glass but thirty years later my hand still remembers
how skin-scuffingly unpleasant they were when stroked in the Snowdonia direction.
My cousin knew what they were.
‘Common spotted dogfish,’ she said,
‘One of the smallest members of the shark family.’
We were impressed, although more by their
living fishy wriggliness
than by her schoolteacher-to-be lecture on
cartilaginous fish and their ancient ancestry.
‘And they’ve come here to die,’ I said, staring,
Cassandra-like, at the fish at my feet.
And then I saw it:
a black case trailing from a tangled black strand
half given up by a slit in a creature’s belly.
I pulled on the case,
gently at first, then harder -
because what did that fish have to lose?
All at once, the thing was free and in my hand.
‘Look! Look!’ I shouted, at the wind, the waves, the sky, the dogfish, as much as at my sister and cousins.
‘It’s a mermaid’s purse!’
We ran then, to and fro,
from dogfish to dogfish,
hopping over sandcastles, kicking aside stones,
not caring how extravagantly we shed our seaweed.
We pulled and we yanked.
louisE taylor