After Gainsborough’s Coastal Scene with Shipping and Cattle

There it is— the cattle, the boats, men struggling to leave a still bluff. Just yesterday we held hands, wondered what was wrong with the boat, the scale, but what do we know of skiffs or the size of bovines two hundred years ago? How would we measure mainsails, halyards, booms, or jibs? What can we say about light, or the way a thunderhead arises to catch its shine except what we have learned here watching sun glance off faces, nimbus glowering off the rocky ledges, our Galloways bellowing in their own fields, and the ferries bellowing as they leave the dock, with us standing, watching, as they struggle to pull away.

Publisher’s Note:

The painting above by Thomas Gainsborough is in the public domain, and the reproduction was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

Sonja Johanson

is a contributing editor at the Found Poetry Review, and was the 2015 recipient of the Zero Bone and Kudzu Poetry Prizes. She was a contributing writer at the 2015 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, has performed at Word Portland, and has three chapbooks: Trees in Our Dooryards (Red Bird Press), Impossible Dovetail (Silver Birch Press, IDES), and all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press).

Sonja is a Lifetime Master Gardener and serves as Outreach Coordinator for the Massachusetts Master Gardener Association. She divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.