Kamikaze

• half way there, she thought

  recounting it later to her children,

  he must have looked down...and remembered
• like a huge flag waved first one way

  then the other
• they treated him as though he no longer existed,

  only we children still chattered and laughed

  till gradually we too learned

  to be silent
• and sometimes, she said, he must have wondered

  which had been the better way to die
• Enough fuel for a one-way

  journey into history
• he must have looked far down

  at the little fishing boats

  strung out like bunting
• the dark shoals of fishes

  flashing silver
• build cairns of pearl-grey pebbles

  to see whose withstood longest

  the turbulent inrush of breakers
• once

  a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous