by Bex Hainsworth

I am on the train home, parallel
to fields blurring into saltwater,
when I think of the coelacanth.

Lazarus fish, thought extinct,
buried with the bones
of our Devonian ancestors,

then had the audacity
to reappear off the coast
of South Africa in 1938.

I am returning from my own
self-imposed exile, swapping
the filleted, flattened lines

and cooling tower caves
of my Midlands existence
for the steep inclines of Yorkshire.

I am swimming upstream:
a coelacanth about to announce
my resurrection, muddy scales

layered like a dry stone wall,
the water in this body de-fossilised,
folding into the River Aire.

I am a discovery, mourned
descendant, and when I walk
around trimmed waves

to my grandmother’s doorstep,
I will know what it means
to come back from the dead.

Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared in Nimrod, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, and trampset. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by Black Cat Poetry Press.