The Tow Rows

My mother once told me that when she was a child there was a story of the village woken in the night by terrible screams. She said it was a ghost story, and it was called The Tow Rows.

I’ve used that memory as the starting point for this poem.

A bleak and haunting tale of a ship lost in a gale, the cries that carried ashore, and the silence that answered them, The Tow Rows explores fear, inaction, and the weight of what is left behind when the sea is finished.