Fire on the Beach

In front of a driftwood fire,
I sat on the Homer Spit frying salmon
in my Mom’s cast-iron pan.

A boy had run toward me
clasping fish and salt in foil.
They had enough to share, he said, his parents
waving, and I looked hungry.

As I turned the fillet over to the flame,
a young eagle dropped silent
from nowhere, talons
grasping fillet from spatula.
His silence made me scream.

A wingtip beat my cheek
and hair. He smelled like sea,
marine clouds, my camp smoke.
He did not touch
the spatula, or look at me.

The sound of his lift
is windfall, rushing water,
every garden seed I sow;
the feather he left
on my shoulder,
a call to wind.

by Buffy McKay
 

Buffy McKay is Inupiaq and Scottish; her parents were Ida Traeger McKay from Unalakleet, Alaska, and William McKay from Glasgow, Scotland. Buffy has attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Key West Literary Seminar & Workshops, and hopes to complete her B.A. in the near future. Buffy's poems have been published in the Anchorage Daily News (2008 Editor's Choice award), the anthology Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment, and the new literary journal Cirque. Buffy's personal mission is "to see the world in as many ways as possible," and this includes living in Anchorage.