by Richard Greene
I
Barefoot, they played football beside their ships,
The fishermen of Portugal's White Fleet:
Hard tackles on the planking and concrete,
And always foreign tongues shouting pleasure
In tones unmistakable to a boy
Who watched old leather fly to makeshift
Goals among the nets and ropes and barrows.
The ships, docked three abreast, filled the harbour
With a swaying thicket of masts and yards
And the white blaze of their clustered hulls.
I cannot imagine how it must have seemed
At night on the Banks, their city of lights
Over a sea that teemed with endless catch,
But in port they were magical enough
To paint the town with rough benevolence,
A giving of half their lives, year by year,
To the fishing grounds and this Irish place.
II
I am five or six, holding my father's hand,
Looking onto the deck of a square-rigger,
One of the last that could have laboured
On the open sea, this fleet's centuries
Salted and stacked in its shadowy hold,
A few men on deck, olive faces burned
Dark by sealight: they stand for thousands.
III
Two lives, divided by sea and season,
Some fathering casually in St. John's
Children they might not speak of in Lisbon
When Autumn sailed them to their legal loves.
As for the rest, they were faithful or cheap,
Fished abroad and bred quietly at home.
In a city of rum-drinkers, they drank
The wine that travelled with them, sold brandy
On the dock to the bootlegger women.
Public order bore with their offences,
And the constabulary made nothing
Of loud drunkenness and small affrays,
Because their charities stood in balance:
At any late hour, a Portuguese crew
Would genially pour out their twenty pints
To save some stranger bleeding at St. Claire's.
IV
They rowed out, single men in their dories,
As the ship stood to seaward like a wall
Built hard against the ocean's farther death.
They paid out trawls, hooks baited with caplin
Or squid, and hauled in the twisting cod
Until their boats brimmed with silver thrashing.
Then pulling the oars back and back they brought
The dories to the ship, loaded their catch
In lowered tubs, and climbed out of the sea.
But sudden mists came on the Banks, white ships
Vanished, and there was nothing to row for
But the fog-horn sounding on a muffled deck.
Easy enough to pass all safety by,
Go in circles or row far past the ship
Towards a swamping on the open sea.
V
Fishermen in procession from their ships
Carry Our Lady of Fatima
Up through the city's winding old world streets
To the Basilica of the Baptist–
This to honour Mary in their other home
And to make a tighter kinship in her prayers
With those who got the gist of an Ave.
That was years before I was even born.
Their virgin stands now in a shrine beside
The altar, kindly and bland and southern
In the midst of a severe architecture,
Out of place among terrible stone saints.
I look for the fishermen in their gift
And find that they are barely knowable:
Their hands hardened by rope and oars and salt,
Hers a little pale plaster outstretched;
Their sailors' eyes narrowed by the sun,
Hers widened toward the light's clemency.
And yet she, Stella Maris, was the prayer
They uttered when they left port in blessed ships,
The prayer for plenty, the prayer for passage.
Fish and fishers gone, she prays for them still,
Their dangers passed and all petitions moot.
VI
Something ended: thirty years of dragnets
Harrowed the seabed to a kind of hell.
I cannot remember when the last white ships
Went through the Narrows, old friendship extinct,
And the ocean breeding only grievance.
At the far end of the harbour I watch
A container ship swallowing cargo,
And, before me, three or four fishing boats
Roped to the wharf waiting for a good year.
So many lifetimes of the Portuguese
Are berthed in the silence of this afternoon,
As their voices ring to a quietness
In memory, just at the moment's edge,
Where sunlight reflects on moving water
A bounty beyond our best intentions.
