Photo: Pixabay
As a child, my dad would take me, on Saturday morning, with a couple of his friends, out fishing at Coverack in a beautiful clinker built boat called The Southern Star. Going there recently, many years on, I found her pulled up beyond high water, much changed from the boat I knew.
Above the sea she sits
Beyond the reach of tide,
That source of strength
That breathes into dead wood
New life.
Ungainly, squat –
In element of air
Not water.
The keel that cleaved the bay
To cut the waves,
That rose and rolled
From sea-green depths,
Pressed hard on granite quoin
Of harbour’s sheltering arm,
Pulled far from surge of storm,
Her dancing days now done.
Her spring-time days are gone,
A story told by paint
That peels and shows
The timber flexed across her frame –
Her bones laid bare and
Bleached by sun and salty air.
Those lines so slick and smooth,
That slipped through seas,
Now jar my sight,
With cabin stuck, as if by chance,
Athwart her beam,
Machined and modern made
Without the care
Of craftsman’s hands,
– Devoid of life.
An alien shape set square
On lines that dip and curve
Reflecting elemental hand.
She sits and waits
For summer sun to climb
To season’s zenith
And call her home
To sea.
But in my soul she sails again,
And she and I are young.
This boat that like a bird
Would fly, would twist and turn
To take the mackerel in its flight –
Now sails the seas
That surge within my mind.
I felt her life,
I heard her song,
That she and I both shared
In far-off sunshine days
Those days of joy
My dad and I once shared –
From grime and gloom
Of factory floor released,
To break, for that brief span,
The bonds of earth
And set the spirit free.
David Oates is a Cornish bard who has published a history of Troon, entitled “Echoes of an Age”, a guide to Godrevy and Gwithian, “Walk the hidden ways” and a slim volume of his own verse, “Poems from the far west”. His unpublished work includes a reflection on a Cornish childhood, “What time do they close the gates, Mister?” and a fictionalised story for young people based on the extant life of St Gwinear, with the working title, “The son of a king”. David is working on another guide in the “Walk the hidden ways” series, entitled “Hard Rock country”.
David is a tenor singer with the well-known group, Proper Job based in mid- Cornwall and has collaborated with Portreath musician, Alice Allsworth, to write the lyrics for a number of songs about Cornwall and the Cornish.
