Everything this man says

Everything this man says

The sharks round here only come on certain types of days
Shark Days we call them.

Certain days when the cloud is low and the water dead
they like that, it lures them to the shoreline.

They’ve a taste for lawyers. Eaten 3. We even lost a mayor.
All they found was his bathers. 

People here have this strange emotional response
to Dingos taking their babies.

An old magic man with claw scars on his chest
taken silently in the midnight to a river bed and savaged

until he screamed and people came running
and they looked at him and said let him die

they said he will never recover, but they carried him
and he kept living and so they thought he must be special

and trained him in botany and now he is ancient
and tourists pay for him to take off his shirt and incite ceremonies.