Smugglers

A lamb lay upon its back
at the foot of the chalk cliffs,
guillemots plucking at its gutstrings
like deft tailors.
While a bandy-legged shepherd
led his charges down paths of wet scree
and spume cuffed the white undercliff
like an admonishment
in the church above
the reverend rose on locked elbows
from his pulpit's nooked altitudes
and bellowed over
the guilded cirlicues of his lecturn

that it was the Devil
who walked abroad
in the bay come neap tide,
cloven hooves crumping through brackish shale
as his imps rode godless men pickaback
out of the alehouse
and drove them, storm-scoured,
down secret ways
into the ocean's black jaws.

While he bade his congregation
heed the fate of those
whose lust for mammon
led them to defy their king and fear the dutyman
they became kegs
bobbing in the shallows.