Steelhead at Devil’s Gulch1
I am late for the spawn.
The redd is gone, the creek still fragile.
Insects dart around my head
like drones over protests.
All I was raised to believe we would defend
teeters.
Miner’s lettuce, maidenhair,
margined white butterfly, Fernald’s iris.
There are new guarantees:
Your heart will not remain unbroken.
All privilege has limits.
We can at least bear witness.
And if you think you cannot watch something die
and let it, you will prove yourself wrong.
Every day a language, a species, a fish.
Freedoms, rights, and hope.
And so, I creep as if it were my last chance
among these trees, or this,
the last breath of here.
1Devil’s Gulch is critical habitat for endangered coho salmon and threatened steelhead populations along the Central California Coast. Several locations along this creek have been restored to help maintain these populations.
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. Her writings are part of the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library, University College Dublin, and her latest poetry collection, Monarch, examines overlooked histories from the US West (Cornerstone Press, 2023). In addition, she is a winter wildlife docent at Point Reyes National Seashore. She is currently working on a poetry collection and multi-media exhibition about protected lands in the Western United States.