Neuro Logical
Beach Life - Stephen O'Reilly
They emerge from the brine at even’tide
Armoured against the flux
Of a fickle blue-white sun that flares
Beneath a gently curved horizon
Pincers held aloft, exultant in frothing surf
Rasping on a dim and ferrous shore
And establish forts on that first beach
Knap flinty stone from beyond the wrack
Harness sparks and learn the knack
Of fusing sand and smelting ore
To harvest lights from distant shores
That glide serenely across The Black
Decipher the tides and eddies above
Stridulate in click-clack tongue
Songs of solace and of flight
To worlds resolved among the lights
Cordial hails in microwave flung
In defiance of petulant sun
Fashion quick machines to extend the reach
From the silicates at their feet
Dishes arrayed along the shore
To cup Creation’s hiss
And speculate, idly, if the myriapodan God
Would have eight or ten legs?
Genesis of the Base-8 War
Shattered carapace strewn across the shore
And when the decapods eventually win
They swear to code out both hind limbs
To honour the Divine and be forever
In accord with octal kind
For eight is the more symmetrical number
The way of dichotomy or bipartition being
The most natural and easy kind of subdivision
Until only the Holy One remains
And lurch clumsy up into The Black
Steam and fire boiling aft
Laughing, no way back
Clinging to the hull with pincers locked
On chitinous ships of cobbled junk
Pushed on silky sails billowed with light
Out to frozen motes of methane ice
And finally reach a more commodious yellow strand
Across the lambent sea of suns
Bio:
Stephen O’Reilly lives in Galway. He is a winner of the 2019 RTE short story Award in honour of Francis MacManus and a Molly Keane Memorial Award and his work has appeared most recently in The Daily Drunk and The Cabinet of Heed. His short stories have been published in various collections in the UK and Ireland.