The song of the herring

These crabs would render no service to Zeus,
their pincers bound with luminous tape,
heaped and helpless on a pallet of ice;
these cockles scooped in a measuring cup,
blank-eyed mackerel and floundering eels,
cold under din and a fine spray of rain –
good for the coin and the fishmonger’s steel,
a knife from the gills to the renal vein.
I swear that a herring looked straight at me
as I stood in line. I swear a turbot,
a plaice and a prawn remembered the sea,
sang, "Taut is the line and strong is the gut,
early the rousing and danger the dish
for those that would make their fortune in fish."