Fish Salters

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,

Like flying fish, one second in the sun.