D’fhág Richard Murphy an saol seo inné. Seo dán óna Collected Poems 1952 – 2000
The Last Galway Hooker
le Richard Murphy
Where the Corrib river chops through the Claddagh
To sink in the tide-race its rattling chain
The boatwright’s hammer chipped across the water
Ribbing this hooker, while a reckless gun
Shook the limestone quay-wall, after the Treaty
Had brought civil war to this fisherman’s town.
That ‘tasty’ carpenter from Connemara, Cloherty,
Helped by his daughter, had half-planked the hull
In his eightieth year, when at work he died,
And she did the fastening, and caulked her well,
The last boat completed with old Galway lines.
Several seasons at the drift-nets she paid
In those boom-years, working by night in channels
With trammel and spillet and an island crew,
Tea-stew on turf in the pipe-black forecastle,
Songs of disasters wailed on the quay
When the tilt of the water heaved the whole shore.
‘She was lucky always the Ave Maria,’
With her brown barked sails, and her hull black tar,
Her forest of oak ribs and the larchwood planks,
The cavern-smelling hold bulked with costly gear,
Fastest in the race to the gull-marked banks,
What harbour she hived in, there she was queen
And her crew could afford to stand strangers drinks,
Till the buyers failed in nineteen twenty-nine,
When the cheapest of fish could find no market,
Were dumped overboard, the price down to nothing;
Until to her leisure a fisher priest walked
By the hungry dockside, full of her name,
Who made a cash offer, and the owners took it.
Then like a girl given money and a home
With no work but pleasure for her man to perform
She changed into white sails, her hold made room
For hammocks and kettles, the touch and perfume
Of priestly hands. So now she’s a yacht
With pitch-pine spars and Italian hemp ropes,
Smooth-running ash-blocks expensively bought
From chandlers in Dublin, two men get jobs
Copper-painting her keel and linseeding her throat,
While at weekends, nephews and nieces in mobs
Go sailing on picnics to the hermit islands,
Come home flushed with health having hooked a few dabs.
Munich, submarines, and the war’s demands
Of workers to feed invaded that party
Like fumes of the diesel the dope of her sails,
When the Canon went east into limed sheep-lands
From the stone and reed patches of lobstermen
Having sold her to one on Cleggan Quay,
Who was best of the boatsmen from Inishbofin,
She his best buy. He shortened the mast, installed
A new ‘Ailsa Craig’, made a hold of her cabin,
Poured over her deck thick tar slightly boiled;
Every fortnight he drained the sump in the bilge
‘To preserve the timbers.’ All she could do, fulfilled.
The sea, good to gamblers, let him indulge
His fear when she rose winding her green shawl
And his pride when she lay calm under his pillage:
And he never married, was this hooker’s lover,
Always ill-at-ease in houses or on hills,
Waiting for weather, or mending broken trawls:
Bothered by women no more than by the moon,
Not concerned with money beyond the bare need,
In this boat’s bows he sheathed his life’s harpoon.
A neap-tide of work, then a spring of liquor
Were the tides that alternately pulled his soul,
Now on a pitching deck with nets to hand-haul,
Then passing Sunday propped against a barrel
Winding among words like a sly helmsman
Till stories gathered around him in a shoal.
She was Latin blessed, holy water shaken
From a small whiskey bottle by a surpliced priest,
Madonnas wafered on every bulkhead,
Oil-grimed by the diesel, and her luck lasted
Those twenty-one years of skill buoyed by prayers,
Strength forged by dread from his drowned ancestors.
She made him money and again he lost it
In the fisherman’s fiction of turning farmer:
The cost of timber and engine spares increased,
Till a phantom hurt him, ribs on a shore,
A hulk each tide rattles that will never fish,
Sunk back in the sand, a story finished.
We met here last summer, nineteen fifty-nine,
Far from the missiles, the moon-shots, the money,
And we drank looking out on the island quay,
When his crew were in London drilling a motorway.
Old age had smoothed his barnacled will,
One calm evening he sold me the Ave Maria.
Then he was alone, stunned like a widower–
Relics and rowlocks pronging from the wall,
A pot of boiling garments, winter everywhere,
Especially in his bones, watching things fall,
Hooks of three-mile spillets, trammels at the foot
Of the unused double-bed–his mind threaded with all
The marline of his days twined within that boat,
His muscles’ own shackles then staying the storm
Which now snap to bits like frayed thread.
So I chose to renew her, to rebuild, to prolong
For a while the spliced yards of yesterday.
Carpenters were enrolled, the ballast and the dung
Of cattle he’d carried lifted from the hold,
The engine removed, and the stale bilge scoured.
De Valera’s daughter hoisted the Irish flag
At her freshly adzed mast this Shrove Tuesday,
Stepped while afloat between the tackle of the Topaz
And the St John, by Bonfin’s best boatsmen,
All old as himself. Her skilful sailmaker,
Her inherited boatwright, her dream-tacking steersman
Picked up the tools of their interrupted work,
And in memory’s hands this hooker was restored.
Old men my instructors, and with all new gear
May I handle her well down tomorrow’s sea-road.
