Little fishingboats, like minnows around the Nissan ship’s leviathan, skim the sea’s silver top coat as they skate into the hungry rivermouth. The King of Deira’s dusty bones, fifteen hundred years asleep beneath Pen Bal Crag, where a century is a blink, didn’t stir at the mammoth crane bouldering along the pier wall, laying down new blocks as it went, rumbling thunder to wake the dead and asleep with Macbeth’s Malcolm, neither of them even notice the latterday hum of tiny sculls, like no longboat they ever saw. Spattering the canvas of this ancient seashore, these minutes not even seconds and will be relived nevermore. Harry Gallagher