Your stones loosen in the churn of freshwater
where they once woke, spirited and carried
West to East, promising Good Harbor.
Whose earliest map was written upon hearts?
Sunk with their exhaustion
your stones piled into two island cairns,
planted tombstones
for our drowned.
Mourning reveals Petosky stones speckle
your beach, fossilized ballast weight.
Aren’t they ghostships
spiriting keystones to a Neverland?
At night, your lighthouses come alive,
their southward shine tethers us,
shored to her quarters, her warning of shoals.
For those who seem
to ignore your perilous coasts
pearled clouds burn off
a harbor-fog, gathered in bay
where stars firefly the night
like from before we were born
when their presence rose
between step and inland sea.
We sail onward in plover’s wake,
attuned to waves
so that we may see
the light.
** Song to pair with the poem: Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (1976)
Shelli Rottschafer
Poet, Educator, and Advocate Shelli Rottschafer (she/her/ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in 2005 in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 she taught at a small liberal arts college in Michigan. Now she lives and writes in Colorado and New Mexico.