There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence (the Biblical quotes are from the Catholic Douay-Rheims translation):
By the word of the Lord the heavens were established; and all the power of them by the spirit of His mouth: gathering together the waters of the sea, as in a vessel; laying up the depths in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord, and let all the inhabitants of the world be in awe of Him. (Psalm 32, v 6-8)
How great are Thy works, O Lord; Thou hast made all things in wisdom: the earth is filled with Thy riches. So is this great sea, which stretcheth wide its arms: there are creeping things without number: creatures little and great. There the ships shall go. (Psalm 103, v 24-26)
Then the Lord answered Job out of a whirlwind, and said: Who is this that wrappeth up sentences in unskilful words? (Job 38, v 1-2)
"Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence; tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. (George Santayana)
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(Month of St Joseph the Worker)
Early morning, tide out: the beach shingle rattles
Beneath foot; the sand flats, hide-brown and low leaning,
Stretch to the far sea, sigh-falling in misty mauve.
Here, there, are herring gulls preening.
A cold wind and low cloud in this gull-calling sphere
Make a grey stifling day, though restless with promise
For trigger-Equinox is near; the black-head gulls
Are black-headed again; Momus
Was wittily apt, crafting their red-beaked, hooded
Circus capers, petite and touchy. Warily
Winging, they snub my crackling lurch through the shingle –
A penance to walk on, slyly
Turning ankles or sinking a foot dead. At sea,
Distant around the offshore reefs, dried toothily
By the spring tides, the crabbers heel, wrestling with traps;
Their launching tractor, forlornly
Dismissed, rust-patched with eczema, squats on the pooled
Sands, its tracks grooved from the beach top like a ploughman’s
Furrows. Curses and battering as pots are decked
Sift on the wind through the no-man’s
Waves. How harsh, how harsh! this daily wrenching, salt-scoured,
Wind-drilled, desperate for feedstuffs, captured bloodied
And flesh-torn – in the marshy fields, from the soused rocks
Or far at sea. Mere scraps, muddied
And stinking, a crab claw perhaps, are spitefully
Fought for by gulls, wings inter-grappled, beaks clashing,
Screeching like harpies; deep sea, a trawler hand screams,
His arm sucked in a winch, hashing
To blood-pudding in pain-crushed seconds; or a net
Being shot whips a man’s legs, flinging him flailing
Into Alp-like seas, lugging him to the depth-ooze
Where net-wrapped he totters, mouthing
Water like Phlebas, these two weeks dead. In lash up
Workshops on harbour walls, greased lumps of gear, rusted
And work-bleached, are clattered and drilled by wind-burnt men;
Then, fingers crossed, to be hoisted
Back to the bowels of some crank, stained tramp, afloat
(If its pumps work) by luck and patching. For, ever,
They that trouble the sea in ships have high-rolled fate,
Sound seams and glowering weather.
(Month of St Joseph the Worker)
Early morning, tide out: the beach shingle rattles
Beneath foot; the sand flats, hide-brown and low leaning,
Stretch to the far sea, sigh-falling in misty mauve.
Here, there, are herring gulls preening.
A cold wind and low cloud in this gull-calling sphere
Make a grey stifling day, though restless with promise
For trigger-Equinox is near; the black-head gulls
Are black-headed again; Momus
Was wittily apt, crafting their red-beaked, hooded
Circus capers, petite and touchy. Warily
Winging, they snub my crackling lurch through the shingle –
A penance to walk on, slyly
Turning ankles or sinking a foot dead. At sea,
Distant around the offshore reefs, dried toothily
By the spring tides, the crabbers heel, wrestling with traps;
Their launching tractor, forlornly
Dismissed, rust-patched with eczema, squats on the pooled
Sands, its tracks grooved from the beach top like a ploughman’s
Furrows. Curses and battering as pots are decked
Sift on the wind through the no-man’s
Waves. How harsh, how harsh! this daily wrenching, salt-scoured,
Wind-drilled, desperate for feedstuffs, captured bloodied
And flesh-torn – in the marshy fields, from the soused rocks
Or far at sea. Mere scraps, muddied
And stinking, a crab claw perhaps, are spitefully
Fought for by gulls, wings inter-grappled, beaks clashing,
Screeching like harpies; deep sea, a trawler hand screams,
His arm sucked in a winch, hashing
To blood-pudding in pain-crushed seconds; or a net
Being shot whips a man’s legs, flinging him flailing
Into Alp-like seas, lugging him to the depth-ooze
Where net-wrapped he totters, mouthing
Water like Phlebas, these two weeks dead. In lash up
Workshops on harbour walls, greased lumps of gear, rusted
And work-bleached, are clattered and drilled by wind-burnt men;
Then, fingers crossed, to be hoisted
Back to the bowels of some crank, stained tramp, afloat
(If its pumps work) by luck and patching. For, ever,
They that trouble the sea in ships have high-rolled fate,
Sound seams and glowering weather.
