Low tide

Grey seals are moaning in birth and birthing late into the night where pups’ yellow pelts dry with afterbirth while their fatty mothers slipe in muddy sea bank, their ink pool eyes full of a winter. It is a return year on year to mate, to haul up sands with the heft of a mystery ― giving birth on the very shore their mothers gave them life within this salty grey. Out in the Humber, boats lie flat at low tide: carry again and again cargo of the world on their shoulders.