Austropotamobius pallipes
Used to swarm chalk streams;
now you hide your face,
hunched up in a re-entrant
or wedged in the space
where a brick crumbled
from a culvert.
Now your American cousin’s in command –
daily marches along the riverbank,
bold, brash, claws of brass
clacking away at your erstwhile nest,
turning it into a family restaurant.
Bigger and impermanent.
Populations surge, others are sent out
in exilium, their millions dwindling,
former homes reduced to kindling.
But I have always preferred you, native cray,
for the complexity and cadence of your name,
the limpet striations of your pallid feet.