Undertow

For thirty-three seasons their grandfather fished
for cod, off Iceland and the Terre Neuve,
packed off by their grandmother's zeal
for the best in the village, her rolls of cloth
unused in the attic.

Blessed by Our Lady of the Ships,
her arms uplifted to the sky
to meet the wall of water,
he rolled the waves' inexorable axis,
and skimmed mean muddy shore hugging waves,
the salt cracking his numbed hands,
on planks slippery with fish.

Seeing land with sea eyes,
back at the wall of names of those who didn't return,
at fifty he refused to go again,
trawling the farms instead, the smell of those fish
etched ever in his memory, like the cod liver oil
which made them retch as children.

They lived a pebble's throw from the shore,
watching cargo ships outline the horizon,
hearing the foghorn sing for those off course,
picking winkles and cockles off the beach to go.

A whiff of ozone, pungent seaweed,
a warm embrace of water on late evenings, and
inland, sunning themselves on rocks with lizards,
young heathens, mesmerized by fires.

Today, with their children, they return.
They make a sculpture for the sea,
a tree trunk ripped from the earth by waves,
locked in by weighty rounded stones, and
crossed with more wood,
planed bare and paint grazed by motion,
shawled in blue netting, with
ribbons of vraic and coloured rope and a plastic crown,
arms raised to the setting sun.

Like flotsam and jetsam of land and water
in the inter-tidal zone,
in votive return for treasures given and taken,
drawn to that shore, its
roughness and nearness to sea,
migrating, driven westwards, nomadic,
but coming home.

© Jacqueline Mézec

(Originally titled 'Haven' this poem was first published in the Jersey Evening Post as part of a winning entry in the Jersey Evening Post Writing Competition of 1998)

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