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| Photo "Fishing Boats" by samuieblue courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net |
I have been asked by a number of people recently, not all in town, in the country or indeed in the same continent, so I think that posting here may help all of them read it.
I am tremendously proud to have won the first prize at this year's Gibraltar Autumn Festival Poetry Competition with a poem which is part of a collection that I am writing inspired by the sea. Asked by a local journalist what inspired the poem, I explained it was the sight of elderly ladies, fishwives I'll call them, sitting by barrels of fish on a beach salting the flying fish caught earlier that morning by the fishermen now drying their nets on the sand. Behind them, hanging on what looked like washing lines strung with silver, the salted fish fluttered in the sea breeze, much as they tried to do when death came to claim them. The image stayed with me and burst out of my pen one August afternoon.
Fish Salters
They beat at the salt with their hands;
Broad hands, working hands
With skin brown and creased like toasted
walnuts
And knotted with straining veins,
And they pull and pat and knife and slice,
Fingers scraping till they bleed,
At silver scales that stick
To the aprons they spread across their
skirts;
Black and grey and dull brown cloth
stretched across
Milk white thighs clamped closed
Until their fishermen sail home.
They sing their old songs while they
Split and they gut and they bone
The fish that flew today, that
Fell prey to that one wish
To soar through the blue where sky skims
waves,
To feel the sun on their sea soaked skins
For just that once. Once was enough.
Now they flutter silently on lines
Stretched across the sand, split and
salted,
Staring sightlessly at a bleached summer
shoreline.
The fishwives sing and laugh, and chatter
About the old days when their mothers
Bustled at the huddle of homes
They made their own at the foot of a
mountain
Where the sea flicked a serpentine tongue
At the curve of a bay,
And where their men beached their boats
And scoffed at the surf sirens
Who screamed their names out in storms,
And mocked the stone demons,
Who in the winter tempests hurled
Boulders from the mountaintops.
They sing and they clap and the
Old men knot their nets and beam their
Toothless grins at little girls
Who dance in the sand, hand in hand,
Skirts fluttering like coloured flags,
