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.

Between the land and sea

Winners of the Gibraltar Poetry Competition 2014 with the judge, Mr Durante, and the Minister for Culture, Mr Linares

The Gibraltar Autumn Festival is in full swing and once again the poetry competition took place and attracted over 200 entries.  Among them mine, a poem inspired by the sea, an ever-present feature in my life.  I was delighted when this was chosen as the overall winner, and no less delighted if truth be told, when my son won his age category with a poem called "Over the bridge" which was inspired by the strong emotions provoked by exams -  he has his mock GCSE exams looming this month.

Me, receiving my prize from the Minister and looking embarrassed - I hate photos!

The competition judge, Charlie Durante, spoke in his introduction to the award ceremony about the breadth of themes touched on in this year's entries, including war poems.  I guess this year, marred as it has been by some conflict or other around the globe and the threats that ideological extremism pose to any lasting peace anywhere, joined by the memories of the First World War so strong this the year of this war's centenary, the theme of war cannot be far from our minds.

My boy, David Anderson, surprised and delighted at winning his category.

It is always interesting to browse entries and see what others see around them, what inspires them to make an observation, write it down and record it for posterity. Poetry opens a single window to the poet's thoughts which in a poem are expressed in a deeply personal way, a unique way which cannot be echoed by anyone else.  So in reading some of the winning entries which we are lucky to read in the Gibraltar Chronicle, sponsors of the event, we are able to dip into insights to the world about us.  David kindly allowed me to reproduce his poem below and I was surprised that he (usually to be found nose to screen in the depths of some computer game or other, communicating in binary code or peculiar adolescent grunts and trading in bit coins - whatever these are) demonstrated such a sensitive view of how it feels to sit at a desk in the exam room, waiting to turn that question paper round, knowing your entire future is at stake, and perfectly aware that any conscious knowledge of the subject you might have had escaped your over-worked brain over breakfast that morning.  His poem is about the tension of crossing that chasm of fear and tackling those exams.  Maybe although I never seem to catch him with a book in his hand, the boy is literate after all.

Mother and son, proud moment

My poem was sparked by a photograph my very talented photographer daughter took of her son last year on a beach.  The sense of wonder that a two-year-old displays in his face as he looks around the infinite spaces of sea-shore and horizon beyond borders on the indescribable.  When I look at my grandsons and recall how my own children looked at the world around them with insatiable curiosity, absorbing details, thinking about what they see, working out their world and what might lie beyond the horizon, I see the child-like wonder that adults have usually lost.  That we should also view the world about us with the same sense of non-judgemental curiosity would be a wonderful thing itself.  

And there was a third family entry.  My 12 year old daughter, Carmen added her thoughts to the event and came up with a poem expressing her feelings and fears about the shadow cast by the ebola epidemic, which even in the twenty-first century awakens the horrors of plague and disease experienced for generations.  I am a very proud Mum at the moment, needless to say.

Congratulations to all the winners and runners up - many poems were terrific.  I also congratulate all who entered, because it is not without a little courage that you put your intimate thoughts out for the world to see.


Over the Bridge by David Anderson

It’s a darkness,

A cloud, dense and purple,

That threatens to engulf my world,

To choke me,

To clasp me to its icy chest

Till my ribs snap

And I breathe no more because

It hurts when I breathe,

And I’m standing

In the yellow stains of school-room lights,

Waiting-

Gagging breath clogging my throat-

Just waiting for that one bark;

Start.

And then there’s light,

Blinding bright till my eyes smart,

Shining from the sheet

That lies on my desk,

Neat and clean and blank,

Like my sorry schoolboy mind.

And there’s a chasm there,

A yawning gap

With red, raw rocks,

Like hunting teeth,

That want to tear at

The thin threads of knowledge

My teachers tried to weave;

Except, there is a calm voice

In the flood of alarm

That leads me to step

Across a swaying rope bridge,

From cliff edge to mountain top,

Across the gorge of ignorance.

And I step, trembling,

Nib of pen shaking,

Fog thinning and clouds lifting,

And I edge,

Word by word,

Over the bridge.

Between land and sea by Jackie Anderson 

Between the land and the sea I stand,

By lace-frilled shore,

On strip of sand,

A beach that to my tiny frame

Stretches like the stretch

Of time that passes slow,

Time that only just has been and

Time that without fail is yet to come.

With fingers still to find their strength,

I trace the shapes of paths

That reach the lapping waters

And seek to reach beyond,

Beyond the edges of the blue,

Beyond the reaches of my childlike mind,

Further than those places where

The crooning, soothing sea touches sky.

I pace the shore,

Toes deep in tiny grains

To anchor me to the earth

And hold me close to all that I hold dear,

To ground me to a haven.

And yet I gaze and seek

To reach beyond the blue,

And take the magic of the sun

In the palm of my hand,

Hold the rainbow in my eyes

And breathe the mysteries that lie

Where sand and sea and child touch sky.

Catch me if you can by Carmen Anderson

I travel

I race

I leap

Through sky and sea and fields.

I’m coming for you,

Closer and closer every day.

But I don’t understand;

You have technology,

You have computers, cameras, phones,

But you can’t stop me,

You can’t kill me,

You can’t cure my work.

I thunder through towns

I rampage through cities.

I terrify.

I destroy.

I devastate.

And you can’t stop me.

You are to busy,

You are too rich to care,

Too complacent in your comfort.

You don’t think that I’m going to catch you.

But I will,

Unless

You stop and think and change your ways,

You dedicate time

To stopping me,

To killing me,

To curing me.

The thing is,

You have to do it

Before it’s too late

You’re smarter than me.

But I’m fast,

Catch me if you can.

Because I will catch you.