Sue McBean

Only an ocean away.
On the “scatter my ashes’ island.
Across the Atlantic. Rathlin.
Eider ducks coo, tide ebbs and flows,
and oyster catchers scream alarm.

The soft eiders,
huddle close for safety in numbers.
They seem to fly under water.
Menacing gulls circle overhead.
There are no chicks yet
for airborne rats to play tyrant over. They’ll
cross the Sound to scavenge easier food,
sharing it with land rats:
chips from waste bins in a seaside town.

In neglected ground the flowers cannot flourish.
Deep tap roots of perennial weeds must be dug up
with fork, sweat and broken back.
And tangled nettle runners traced along their course
dragged out, easier in this drought.
Choking roots in America are not annuals
that pull up with the greatest ease.

Was that the sound of someone going under, in the bay?
A last swoosh of an arm. Drowning.
The panning torch caught sight of a white arm.
It tilted and curved up like a farewell wave, or doff of a cap.
An Eider throwing his head back in silence.

The thick pen, like a chisel,
changes the face of the rock.
Misshapen sculpture replaces
centuries of wisdom, slashes grace and
cuts communities. This installation
grows bigger and more gloomy
with every wound.
The debris of US is swept up and binned.

The wind picks up in the right direction.
At low tide we burn ten years of neglected Hebe hedge.
The flames roar at the base of the bonfire with consuming rage.

Sue McBean is a nurse teacher, sailor, wildflower photographer, and botanist who writes creatively. Living many years now on the North coast of Northern Ireland, she was brought up on the flat lands of the Cambridgeshire Fens. Sue writes mainly prose with poetic style, reflecting on her life, exploring themes of sea, sailing, island life, and nature. She is interested in overlaying difficult experiences with beauty, art and laughter and is currently writing a memoir, a series of essays about well-being and children’s stories.

This poem appeared in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age — Summer 2025, published by The Chaos Section Poetry Project. We’ll be featuring each poem from the collection individually in the weeks ahead. You can read the full collection or download a free PDF of the chapbook here.