Scarborough by Zaffar Kunial

In Middle English the word also meant “dwelling” . . . related to Old English
beorg hill, mound, from Indo-European *bhergh- . . . see BARROW mound

– Chambers Dictionary of Etymology

But the tide was coming in; the water was rising; the gulfs and lakes were filling; the straits were
widening: it was time to seek some safer footing

– Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

I

Like Mum, whose middle name was wrongly spelled
on her death certificate as ‘Anne’, your end –
like that still silent e – bothers me. Raised inland
you were haunted by the waves. Anne Brontë.
Quiet as castles, your grave, far from the family
vault, is almost beyond the country, on a limb
by the North Sea. To recover. You’d go out east

to that coast, days from your end – for what? The rub
of salty air? Of a picked up pebble? And there
the sea’s drum, loud and not, perhaps the mother
cancer took early. The rhythm of memory
puts time ahead of itself and we’re pulled to miss
a coast that is not yet home. The tide. It’s an
oxygen machine, still going. Its constant hum.

II

I can’t bear the long silence at the end. You have an
e, silent and stressed, at the far end of your names.
My mother’s Mum began at a land’s end too – 
straight up, north, as the crow flies, of you, Anne –
in Aberdeen. Once, standing by a sea wall
at St Ives, the far south west – the other side
of your mother’s birthplace, on that kicking foot

of Cornwall – looking at the Celtic Sea, turning
to me, Mum said the tide was maternal, a comfort.
At five she lost her mother, Julia, to an asylum
and she’d never learn of the coasts before her.
If ever I asked, a silence, not quite hers, returned.
Perhaps I’ll come back to this another time
and say more. Perhaps I’ll speak again with you.

III

Inishowen. Shetland. Orkney. Have you seen a rock,
pocked by a limpet’s coming and going, where home
gets spelled by scratches of a shell? Well. Guess what?
It’s called a home scar. The Friday Dad met Mum
she was heading westward, for the coast of Rhyl
in North Wales and stopped off at Birmingham.
She was on her own and something loud had pulled

her to the railway, to the sea. I get a pull to forget.
My local cinema. Under the hill,
my coast widescreens into view – loud waves, other
worlds lap in – my land’s edge. Escape. Therapy.
Hebden Bridge Picture House, near where you began.
A red ceiling, ribbed, a whale’s gut, a dark womb.
Sea gusts or not. I don’t care where action’s set

IV

or when. Wherever I am I carry pebbles, Anne.
And shells. Small places, that open like a screen. Once
I placed pieces of one crystal on graves far
apart. I like films that go on, sagas. And. And.
I haunt the same seat. Other times are where
I watch beyond what happens, buried edgelessly
as a quiet last vowel. Inland and at sea.

*

I forgot to say, Mum was raised by her dad’s
English parents. Who’d return to Rhyl
each summer. An Arthur. And an Agnes. Mum’s
mother figure. Julia Ann was in delayed
mourning that Friday she took the train to sea.
There’s extra things to say, as ever, but I’m
going to be quiet. And stop early. I’ll

V

leave this here, Anne, wherever this is.