This week’s poem, Steve Luttrell’s “Storm Surge,” is a paean to the beloved fish shacks of Willard Beach, in South Portland, which washed away earlier this year in an epic winter storm. I love this poem’s elegiac tone and mythic imagery, and its nod to the shacks as symbols from the poet’s youth.

Luttrell was born in Portland, where he served as that city’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2011. He is the founding editor of The Café Review, an internationally acclaimed art and poetry quarterly, founded in 1989. He has been widely published in poetry journals and is the author of six books of poetry. He lives in Falmouth.

Storm Surge
By Steve Luttrell

After the storm
the shacks were gone
that had stood there
all those years.
Those fishing shacks
at the point of a ledge
would pierce Atlantic waters,
were carried away
on a wind and a wave
as if they were never there.
Countless northern gales
had slapped those salt-stained boards
but only one would come
to take them down.
They had been for me,
emblems of my youth
where now a wounded landscape
meets the eye.
The shacks are gone
now seared in memory,
lost to time.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Storm Surge,” copyright 2024 by Steve Luttrell, appears by permission of the author.

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