Creana Bosac

Spirit of the Loch

They gather with laughter, as birds

in bright plumage: t-shirts, flip-flops,

denim shorts, one girl in a pink

bikini top, the boys loud, brash,

lighting portable barbeques.

And after, the land is stippled

with cans of shining sharp metal,

incongruous in swaying grass,

and a scatter of food, plastic,

a broken chair, sprouts from brown earth:

detritus of the delusion

that some attendant, some assumed,

unseen spirit of the loch will,

in discrete customer service,

reinstate the wild.

First published in Briefly Zine, Issue 7: Climate Emergency, December 2021. Available at https://brieflywrite.com/issue-7/