ghost ships
as the last of the evening light crinkles
across the lough & the stars squint
at their double: the cluster of headlights
circling below, tractor beams like comets
over purled rows of cabbages, dark and fat
in their fenced-off fields, the water pulls in
to the roadside, filling in potholes
with driftwood & dulse, plumping up
the sloughy bed of wetland, so that
when the flare of an ambulance light comes
tearing through the inked-dark tide, they arrive
only to witness the end of the birth of a star
splintering out across the lough,
where ghost ships ride the water
out past Strangford and into open sea.