The Spirit of Jersey

First was rock, not an island
but granite rising proud of the plain,
to be carved and eroded by the ice and wind.
In caves it offered shelter, a place to kill.
Man celebrated stone,
obdurate, monolithic, strong,
granite crystals warmed by sun
capturing heat. Over the ages
hands would sculpt and strew
dolmens, fairy stones,
lavoirs, abreuvoirs,
buildings rough hewn from the rock,
seeming part of the rock still,
cider crushers, wayside crosses,
slips and piers,
a benediction in stone
and metal, brick and glass,
over thousands of years, the island
getting the face it deserves.

Sea flowed and ebbed and flowed,
part of a global tide, abandoning stone high and dry
then forming islands again,
trickling its brine through folk memories
of drowned forests and villages brimming under waves,
caves and shipwrecks, magical vast tides,
dreams of a tidal wave beside vraic fires.
Today, here where fish finned and gulped, where boats rocked,
in stone aquariums clerks watch the tides
of electronic trade ripple around the globe.

Sea makes you feel weather,
changes colour with the dappling sky,
curves and humps and puckers with the drag of moon.
Growing crops makes you feel weather too, its burn and bite,
wary of a turn of air, a friction of birds,
tuning in to the cycles of fertility and light.
Hawthorn and banks and mazy muddy lanes mark out your land.
One son will take over the farm, another will go to sea.
Life ripples out from this point, to your fields,
out to your parish and your fief, sometimes to town,
sometimes to the world outside.
News ripples back very very slowly.
Years go by, days become numbers on a VDU,
and the scent of spring lures people in their air-conditioned cars
to garden centres, tempted by a whim to grow.

An island gives identity,
this cradling circle of water defines,
rocks forming a girdle of defence.
No need for nationalism, man-made boundaries,
to make you unique.
All your relationships are on this human scale,
feeling a gravitational pull back to this place,
to these neighbours that you love or hate but can't escape.
Privacy is respected, money and fame lying low in a country parish.
Your relationships to mainlands are fluid like the sea,
feeling you can control what comes in and goes out,
and problems can be shipped out on the next tide.

Smallholdings, small fields,
but hundreds of miles of country roads seduce you
into feeling lost in a far bigger place.
So perhaps, in your isolation, you become a little quirky,
you evolve separately. Other creatures must swim here
or be blown on the wind. The world turns inwards,
close horizons, island madness.
The sea turns against you, the mist closes in,
the airport shuts down, newspapers don't arrive,
the world divides between islanders and those outside.
You feel safe here in your walls of granite,
feeling for now that the rain can't wet and
the sea can't drown.

The Normans, shaped and disciplined by sea,
sailors, boat builders, farmers, merchants,
left these customs, this freedom, this service,
this warring Frenchness and stubborn loyalty
and years of being trilingual, English in the town,
French in the States, Norman in the country,
language, that ricochet of thought passed down
through generations of custodians.
How do you explain? Your tongue
is the way you confer love and meaning,
not everything translates.
And sanctuary works both ways, people leave and enter,
defending against outsiders and giving them shelter,
refugees and exiles of politics and poverty and hate, and taxes too.
The town is won over by the many tribes.

At night plastic côtils shiver like the sea,
and clos and marais and mielle
may seem haunted by old feasts of work,
the knitting and black butter veilles,
the salt of vraic and ormering tides,
that drive to furnish wooden ships
and follow fish to new found lands
and sail out on a smuggling tide,
that need to barter, reinvent,
that spirit of the market place.
Invisible money passes through electronically,
free of associations.

We quarry and reclaim,
shape shifting and recycling,
bannelais, seaweed, stone,
and streets curl in town where once ran streams,
horsepower climbs where horses once heaved,
sea cleans beaches where once were built ships,
where carts rode to town, where aeroplanes flew,
and even the buildings must reincarnate,
as this press of communal memories ghosts through,
entrusting this past, in good faith, over to this new.

© Jacqueline Mézec

(This poem was commissioned in 1999 by the Jersey Evening Post for a Millennium supplement)

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