The home-bound armada, 1588
No tengo mas que darte - Inscription on a Spanish sailor's gold ring, in the shape of a hand holding out a heart, found off the western coast of Irland
Their splintered hulls well-raked with cannon fire,
Great sails shot ragged by hot English grape,
The rigging singed or severed or undone,
And decks awash with blood of casualties,
Philip's Armada has no choice - it must
Go home by circling Scotland to the north.
Ships crawl along the British coast, aware
That capture in this realm of heretics
Means long imprisonment or instant death.
The helmsmen are from every port in Spain:
Malaga, Cadiz, Palos, Santander -
And have brought board and canvas through rough seas
That span an empire. Carefully they guide
The bruised fleet northward, past the brackish fens
Of Lincolnshire, and Whitby's craggy head,
Grey Scottish shores that blink with lonely fires
And give no sound save that of screaming birds.
They thread the Orkneys, and the Shetland Isles,
For Spaniards as mysterious as Thule:
Cold barren wastes of rock, kelp, moss and gulls,
Bejewelled with ice, and swathed in milky mist,
Held by half-savage fishermen who speak
In harsh laconic grunts, unwelcoming.
They turn the Minch, pass through the Hebrides,
And set sail for west Ireland's rocky edge.
Then storms come up to roll the northern waves.
A few tossed ships go down with every hand,
And sons of Castile, Navarre and Aragon
Whirl in the currents, graveless and unmourned,
Amidst the keening shriek of Irish gales.
The Spanish pilots grip the spokes of wheels
To which no rudder will respond. The winds
Remind them of mad whistling hurricanes
Off Hispaniola in the new-found world.
A scattering of ships will see this through
And make their limping way back home to Spain,
But other craft spin wildly, stripped of sail,
Dismasted, driven landward, to be wrecked
On the green rocks of Galway, where a few
Gasping survivors crawl up from the surf
And go to helpless slaughter at the hands
Of gallowglasses and barbaric kerns.
In the dark sea, a golden ring slips from
The finger of some luckless mariner
Who will not drink sweet wine again, nor breathe
His country's air, perfumed with oranges.
No tengo mas que darte is engraved:
'I have no more to give you.' A small hand
Offers a golden heart that now sinks down
Into the sandy bottom of the bay.
A sweetheart waits in Spain, and shall wait till
Time and despair have hollowed out her breast
And left her eyes as dim as the damp mists
That girdle Galway when a plangent tide
Withdraws at evening from a wreck-strewn beach,
And takes its tears back to the troubled sea.
Page(s) 2-3
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