Embarkation:
“Go now while you can” toilet trips,
and pointless rummaging
for items unlocated,
pass the queuing time.
Cycles racked and bungee strapped.
Roofboxes. Caravans.
Waiting on drivers and their rigs,
phalanxes of freight.
The sweet fume of petrol
undercut by salt tang.
and neon rips the broken light.
Gulls bicker for scraps on tarmac.
For twenty years my father came this way
watching warships, noting their numbers;
through cold war to détente, and back,
naming the gunmetal greys:
British towns and Greek goddesses.
On a ship’s rail leaning, looking back,
I fathom their allure; picture
his teenage ear lent to a crystal set,
construing the enemy:
Graf Spee, Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Tirpitz.
He never went to sea: signed up
to navigate the skies instead;
was transferred when gliders flew no more,
and ended up in Varna, spying
on a Black Sea fleet at anchor.
Decades on, like some ghost of a frogman,
rudiments of Russian picked up then
found recalled usage, translating
the Hammer and the Sickle,
when Obraztsovy was in port.
Daily ferried by three sisters -
Southsea, Brading, Shanklin - and bearded
in naval fashion, he stands:
pint in hand at bar, sustaining a sense
of other tongues, other islands.
Cast off and underway:
tricolours and Union Jacks,
grubby both, flap loosely.
Cranes salute, point skyward
alongside missile launchers;
who, fresh back from the Gulf
triumphant but empty-handed,
line the wharves.
And now gulls crowd
the detritus-churning wake:
in our turning manoeuvre
rich pickings, below the surface.
vi.2005
