Gale at Sea

An effort to catch something of what it is like to be caught in a full gale at sea. Not pleasant, is an understatement. The poem was meant to be contemporary but became anachronistic as it went on: but not inaccurate - a full gale faced at sea in a sailing ship is a damned sight worse than being in a well-found vessel under power, although Joseph Conrad's "Typhoon" and Richard Hughes' "In Hazard" convey the full horror of being caught in extreme weather in a steam ship. For poetic comparison see Robert Louis Stevenson's marvellous poem, "Christmas at Sea."

   Here's a link to "A Wild Penzance Night," conveying something of what it's like when a gale hits land in the far south-west. The poem was posted on this blog on 11 June 2018.

-------------

Have you felt, man, a force nine gale in your face,
Like being scoured with rivets in every place,
Trying to stand steady against the screaming howl
Of a wind that shrieks then mocks in a growl,
A scrap of sail up which hums like a wire
Strained taut to splitting in the half-light mire:
The combers are crowding the staggering hull
As she forces to windward like a baffled bull;
Spume streaks in ropes the black-hurled waves
Which rear and thunder like stone-roaring caves:
Ah those crests which leap and collapse on the deck,
Choking the scuppers with a foaming beck!
The deck gear and davits have all been smashed,
And nothing’s steady that’s not been lashed;
Like blackout curtains the wave-sweeping clouds
Flinder to rags among the screeching shrouds;
Two helmsmen, drenched, are lashed to the wheel,
The ship’s bucking, tottering, and showing her keel;
The captain and first mate are crouched at the rail
Wrapped in a dodger that cracks like a flail;
The raging scud is a slap in the eyes,
Flaring in the gloom with wails and sighs;
Thrown across deck as the ship rolls in a trough,
It’s freezing, soaking, terror-struck stuff:
And many’s the oath in this death-brinked hell
That land-won safely in a harbour’s dell,
It’s farewell briny, find a girl’s love,
Take to factory work that’s snug as a glove,
Have a rose-filled garden, a babe on the knee,
An allotment for vegetables – cabbage and pea ...
Fast lads, she’s backing, she’s digging her bow,
The sea’s thick on the decks, it’s never or now,
Strain on the braces, fetch her head round,
If she founders we’re done for, we’re all of us drowned –
Can’t breathe, the spray is dense in the wind,
It’s banshee-bellowing, and it’s got me pinned! –
Salt-soaked, exhausted, we worked that ship
As she laboured the curlers like a waterlogged chip:
And what matter my dreams, my promises to self,
Don’t I know that just like a ball on a shelf,
If I settled ashore with all a man longs,
I’d roll off that shelf like a child in its songs
As quick as I heard the hiring gun,
That a ship was crewing, and a wage to be won?

====================
© May 2021

Cornish Gorse

"Artics" is trade slang for articulated lorries; "scrans" is/are foodstuffs; "Castle Chûn" is really Chûn Castle but rhythm required a reverse; if you choose your spot on Penwith moors you can see the sea to north, south and west. "Q-C" is "Q" - pseudonym of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose home was in Fowey, which he immortalized as "Troy Town" in a number of hugely readable novels and stories. "Q-C" was required for the rhythm.

   By way of comparison, here is a link to my 1979 free verse poem "The Ridgeway Above Wroughton" posted on this blog on 18 April 2012.

---------------

What is Cornwall but gorse in flower,
   Frothing in sud-clouds hour by hour,
Yellow as butter in honey dipped,
   Come April when the sun’s wide-lipped
And now-hot smile prompts all that lives
   To a vying grapple – one grabs, one gives –
As growth and propagation surge
   And fledglings, flowers and crops emerge?
The moors and heaths are a cloth of gold
   Billowing to tors by the West Wind strolled,
Rising steep above the slatey towns
   Which gaggle their skirts, all greys and browns;
The Western Highway, curved or straight,
   Shadows their contour, always in spate
With artics, cars and tradesmen’s vans
   Packed with goods or tackle or scrans;
They turn off to the pre-fabbed trading parks
   Speared by the rail line with its rushing barques,
Homing on Redruth, Hayle, Penzance,
   As granite-solid as a Scottish manse.
And always pressing is the Western Sea,
   Never distant, especially
At Castle Chûn, high on the droop
   Of Penwith’s toe, where merlins stoop:
Spring-warm blue or gale-scrubbed green,
   Two Channels’ waters leap and preen,
Hugging the land, that south or north,
   From the gorsy heights, you might plunge forth,
Wind-held, and headlong down to dash
   Like Icarus in those waters’ plash.
That gorse in thicket, bush and clump,
   Spiny, dusty, green of rump,
Rears six-foot tall, packing its flanks
   With two-inch spikes: behind their shanks
The chats and linnets, crimson and pink,
   Dodge shadowily, all flutter and jink,
And later, airborne, unstoppable, qweep
   Their twittered water-notes, springs then neap.

The Final Watershed

Two other lyrics about the approach of death are "In the Dark of Night," posted on 9 August 2018 and linked here, and "There Is Nothing More Louche," posted on 19 October 2021, linked here.

--------------

   His fifties come and gone
   He noticed little change,
Élan and appetite were good;
   Daily the days were long,
   And graft was fair exchange,
Done handily because he could.

   Then after sixty-three,
   So soon, a clutch of pains
Gave aching hint that all decays;
   A seep in energy,
   Sore hip, raw cuts and sprains,
Were frank that flesh must lose its glaze.

   And now at seventy-one
   Sleep bushwacks every day,
His prostate stings, heart fakes a beat,
   Eyes drip in wind or sun;
   His geist withered to clay,
What’s left but thoughts, some shreds of heat?

   Once, life’s packed call, arms-wide,
   Was goal; now, deathwards, he
Drifts coldly from the rousing young:
   A watershed has dried,
   Its desert holds the key:
At end he will be seed or dung.

===============
© February 2021

"There's Snow Inland but on the Coast Just Frost..."

Between 2019 and 2022 I was writing a series of twelve long poems about the sea and littoral (in fact there's one still to finish) linked to the months of the year. This short piece is an out-take from the poem about January.

   In the first part of my poetic "career," roughly 1973 to 1985 I was very much a city man and cannot recollect a single poem about or related to the sea except "Nightfall at Pagham Rife," written in 1978 and revised in May 2012 to remove much blather, (it was a time when I was greatly impressed by Ted Hughes. No longer!) Pagham is a small village to the west of Bognor Regis; the small streams and rivers about it are called "rifes." I posted the poem on 10 May 2012: it is linked here.

--------------

There’s snow inland but on the coast just frost,
Though freezing’s freezing, birds know to their cost:
Pre-dawn there’s frost like paste a’gleam on walls,
Dead silence, not a gull nor cat that calls,
The moon’s pall shimmers, polishing the ice,
All’s paralysed and breath-held in a vice;
But then a blackbird through the silent stun
Risks half-heart fluting, faint and then it’s done,
And next a robin as if cracking sticks
Stut-stutters with its geiger counter ticks;
The gulls, though, wary, wait for light’s first hint
Which shims the rooftops in a blue-black glint,
And then they’ll quarrel, though with sotto-screams,
And launch and circle in the town-light gleams;
For fourteen hours they’ve crouched in ice-crust cold,
Their bellies void, whilst winds have hissed and tolled,
Now, starved, they wing like ghosts, beachward to feed,
Fighting for sandworms or wet shreds of weed.

===============
© January 2021