Harvesting Seaweed
My hand spills out green delicate fronds
of sea lettuce into my cedar-bark basket.
Seagulls echo the gray day. Crows’ squawks
dance through rainforest air.
Here, on my beach below my cabin,
I listen to the whirl of these summer spells—
while the whole planet around me
is breathing and eating.
I, too, am ripping a bit of the ocean,
kissing salt and seaweed
with a crunch, a slurp, a gulp, a swallow.
And I consider all that I have wondered
about from my cabin’s porch, what I’ve
witnessed, have wanted to taste,
while wiping rain from my forehead.
Somewhere in my memory, a sealion
is tossing an octopus into the air
and tearing off its legs.
Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska where she lives and writes at her family’s fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan. Read more.