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Brian Docherty

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Trawlers

It took an August stroll round Howth harbour
to bring back the last summer we went to Girvan.
I was 13 and self-conscious about clothes,
the impression I might make on whoever I met
making the circuit of amusement arcades,
pitch and putt courses, cafes, gift shops,
but most of all it’s the trawlers I remember,
serious working boats with dour crews
who had important tasks to attend to,
who were not about to invite me on board
or tell me about their lives at sea,
out in all weathers far into the Atlantic
on boats with large numbers and traditional names
on the stern, rust and radar, any number
of ways to lose fingers or an arm winning
the fish into the nets, into the holds,
onto the quay for the auctioneer to chant away
to Billingsgate, and on to the nation’s table.
I never ever wanted to go to sea but was still
fascinated by the compound smells rising up,
the thought that my ancestors had done this
or something very like it on wooden boats
with no engines, no radar, no weather reports,
nothing but their own muscle, skill and luck,
and like them I cannot swim, know how to refer
to the departed or lost at sea, know which animal
never to name or the pub will empty, but here
I stand before 90 feet of hi-tech yacht from
Seattle with the tallest mast I have ever seen,
a glamour of questions, that Masefield poem.

 

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