Not at all cheerful, I’m afraid; but I can’t choose the ideas which come to me.
22nd December 2021
Stove-snug after supper, away I drifted
As my radio worried for the ghost fishing toll:
Neglected, abandoned, lost gear in every sea endlessly killing –
Often, indeed, torturously trapping species
So different from those the tackle-setters meant to hunt.
Lobsters and crabs of course, forever steel-imprisoned;
Seals, lifelong pained by necklaces of gristlechafe polypropylene
Or, with dolphins and porpoises,
Noosed or snared by rock-snagged nets:
In minutes, drowned.
Glimmer-lured, gannets and albatrosses
Diving down to myriad baits:
Those glowing white wings soon greenly beat their last.
Sharks large and small, mouth-tethered by relentless hooks
Jagged inside the longlined fish they’ve seized.
And, I suspect, although I’ve not heard tell
Because it hasn’t yet happened to a “First World” child,
The occasional islander girl or boy who brownly ducks a playful wave
And never leanly giggles back up–
A tangling raggle of plastic weave making that lagoon their grave.
Between sleep and wake wavering,
No longer within the keep of wireless words,
Did I faintly see a lad’s face in driftwood flames,
Somehow hear a voice in the chimney’s moan?
First a sigh, long and deep as the undertow
Of steep-raked cobbles when the glass is low…
‘In my time, we never ghost fished.
For a start, with wooden hulls, oars, and sails
We only worked, you’d say, at such a modest scale:
No thousanded hooks, nor miles of steelstrong line –
And always just the hauling power of hands.
For mine was an age before the strength of steam,
So never could we tow such greedy nets astern, abeam.
And while with canvas spread some went to trawl,
Their humble rigs couldn’t harm the ocean floor.’
A second sigh, as long, so young-sounding though so old:
‘In my time, as for most of human know, we fishing crews,
We were the Atlantic’s by-catch –
Who could not think of safety, and never learned to swim.’
© Christopher Jessop 2021
