The Adoption

They were beautiful, and barren, blithely fishing.
The woman was wading in the water.
In the shallows of a sandbar, caught my brother.
She adopted him, a son, like a fish pulled out.
She saw nothing but silver in the fish, nothing else.
The man with the face planes I would inherit
Idled his fingers in the country's long water.
And he thought of nothing. He was watching my mother.
The fishermen's wives were silent to the strangers.
They mended the nets that my brother had broken.
At the prow my salted brother was drying in the sun.
They took him home and life as he remembers it begun.