Voices from the Sea
Part 1, Sounds and Sensations.....
A child hears all of the ocean's roar curled in a shell, listening to voices from the sea.
Everything here is ocean curled, framed by the clampings of land and sea and sky and sea.
Sea meets rock abruptly and teeters in gullies, but over centuries encroaches carving cavities.
Sand is rippled and fingerprint-ridged by waves. A few shells punctuate the high tide line.
We skim the thin blue slip of water, watching houses, seemingly carved out of the shore, wink, dip and disappear.
We feel the tidal heave and roll, and the terrible pull and drag of its mistress, the moon.
Giddy, seeming drunk, we lurch and swagger, poised above an emptiness, confused by gravity, deck coming to meet us mockingly.
We hear the creaking decks, the clapping masts, the pitched whine of the wind, the water slaps on quay.
The sea becomes our mother, rocking ships to sleep, or spitting seaweed at us in her rage.
The seafarer studies the wet skin, its wrinkles and prints, his métier underneath, in current and flow, rip and undertow.
The pilot is the sea surgeon, measuring breeze and taking its pulse, reading dampness of air, and motion of birds.
We navigate by sea-marks, fixed and floating, the beacons, buoys, on land and sea, on church and tower.
That water, frail in drop, so powerful in deep, its transparent fringes darkening to an opaque slicky oily sheen.
On moonlit nights we sorted Chausey oysters, salt and slippy, shipping them for sleeping Londoners.
Part 2, Going to sea.....
We built wood ships in homage to fish, curved and tailed; their ribbed spines lying on sand like whale bones.
In Barque and Barquentine, Brig and Brigantine, Chasse Maree, lugger, smack and sloop, sailing and tilling the brine.
At Fisherman's Chapel, a benediction of men and ships, a Mizpah brooch to a true heart and Bless us Lord............
Taking as brides the sea and ships, leaving villages of women castaway, adrift, heart lost, sea-rich.
'Here be Monsters' on charts where we sailed, Terra Incognita, going in ships to find out where water ends.
To world's end to race the ocean's curl and trace the curve of land.
In tall ships we left to net the harvest of the deep, while landlocked farmers and their cattle sleep.
We sailed to the New Found Land, the teeming cod, the salerie, eperquerie, bearing it South for Catholic ladies' fasts.
We plied the waves with ballast, brandy, cod and conger, hemp and hides, tobacco wool and gin.
In clipper ships, in New World dreaming, souls of men sing as their bodies rot.
Marooned in a fragile boat in a hungry sea, but while on the ocean we might hear the sirens sing.
We don't know where we will bob and crash tomorrow, it might be galleons or diving for pearls.
Part 3, For those lost at sea......
This is the silence of the open main, emptiness from ship to shore, lost in a fog of work, sleep.
On the long crossing our minds unite, in hope, in boredom, in fear, in joy.
The ocean seeming infinite, fathomless, dwarfing us, but taking us to horizons.
We live like animals, but navigate by stars.
Mathematically we chart the seas, plotting tide and time, but are heathens to the drag of moon, the beacon stars.
Tonight the sea lulls like a prayer, charming its rosary of stones, Paternosters, Casquets, Roches Douvre.
A jar, a hiss of surf where none should be, claw the stomachs of the lost at sea.
Goaded by a mad seagull's screaming descant, we prayed to the doll, the figurehead, atheists on land, zealots at sea.
All formless, quick to shape, we need the vessel that our strength is from. Vessel lost the strength is gone.
Drowned men lip their names, scuttled unhallowed at sea. Mewing gulls call over the floaters in the bladderwrack.
How did the women know? The waves told them, the pebbles sucked from the beach told them, that men were drowned.
The beacons light the more angry waves; look at the lighthouses and mark our graves;
From the chapel ceiling a sailing boat hangs, shipwrecked in heaven, memento mori for the lost at sea.
Part 4, A modern world.....
The devil boats came, spitting their coal foul breath, chasing elegance from the sea.
Modern harbours, Victorian accretion undone by steam, dumps for oil and abattoir, not chandlery and rope.
The old lag sits on a pot spinning tales of limbs ripped off by rope tautened to razor by sea.
The old hands sit in harbour-side pubs, drinking to ship-in-a-bottle stories and drowned villages and tolling bells.
Tractors gather in the vraic, their iron muscles mimic Blampied's cart horses for the watchers on the shore.
We coil together as the foghorn booms and cargo boats pass by far out at sea.
Now sea ripples through our language: we're all at sea, above board we touch and go, feel the call of the deep, and in the calm before the storm , we show our true colours and burn our boats.
© Jacqueline Mézec
(This piece was written as part of a project to create phrases to be used as signage for the Jersey Maritime Museum which opened in 1997)