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from
The Shell Notebook Poems, Take 5 04,
Shoestring
Press, ISBN 1 904886 09 4
3. Sailing from France: Henrietta's Romance in 1698
it
would be safer
to
travel at night.
He
wore gold earrings that
glimmered
like the moon.
We
closed the house:
Two
pairs of shoes,
a
coat, a dress.
The
oars swept the black river
and
we waited for the land to change.
We
were pinpricks in the night,
and
the heavens were written
upside
down, on water.
We
were fireflies,
the
guttering of a midnight candle.
In
the dawn,
we
crossed to England.
All
day the sea heaved,
around
the ship, freighted with
rolls
of silk, beneath a linen sail.
I
woke, my hair threaded
with
laments. My mother’s voice
explaining:
‘We have nothing but
our
silence,
no
home, no grace.’
I
came back from the fathoms.
On
the quay, they took our names.
Years
later. I think, I saw the sailor again.
A
backward glance.
His
hand holding mine, on the shore
of
Lough Neagh.
Clare Crossman
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update:
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