Mirage

Howth's soft outline lay like a blue mirage this evening, and the wet ridged sand left much of the bay a giant fingerprint: a screen, touched.

I recently read a version of an old Irish poem about "bright-knolled", "many-coloured" Howth, a place of trees, beasts, swordsmen and wild garlic. Shaved almost bald now, like the rest of the country, and tapering to a lime-white lighthouse flashing and swiveling that hard, bright sword.