Oct 18 – YGTV Poetry Corner: Fish Salters
Every Tuesday, YGTV will share the work of local poets. We’ll post poems submitted to us in order to help writers get more exposure, feedback and criticism. If you write poems, please send them to us for consideration and include a profile pic: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Our work today is by Jackie Anderson, a writer who has been very successful in local poetry and short story competitions. “Fish Salters” is a vivid picture of people engaged in the messy business of cutting and preparing fish. But the poem quickly moves its focus and brings to life the enchanted history and tales of a fishing village with its “demons” and “sirens.”
Fish Salters
They beat at the salt with their hands;
Broad hands, working hands
With skin brown and creased like toasted walnuts
And knotted with straining veins,
And they pull and pat and knife and slice,
Fingers scraping till they bleed,
At silver scales that stick
To the aprons they spread across their skirts;
Black and grey and dull brown cloth stretched across
Milk white thighs clamped closed
Until their fishermen sail home.
They sing their old songs while they
Split and they gut and they bone
The fish that flew today, that
Fell prey to that one wish
To soar through the blue where sky skims waves,
To feel the sun on their sea soaked skins
For just that once. Once was enough.
Now they flutter silently on lines
Stretched across the sand, split and salted,
Staring sightlessly at a bleached summer shoreline.
The fishwives sing and laugh, and chatter
About the old days when their mothers
Bustled at the huddle of homes
They made their own at the foot of a mountain
Where the sea flicked a serpentine tongue
At the curve of a bay,
And where their men beached their boats
And scoffed at the surf sirens
Who screamed their names out in storms,
And mocked the stone demons,
Who in the winter tempests hurled
Boulders from the mountaintops.
They sing and they clap and the
Old men knot their nets and beam their
Toothless grins at little girls
Who dance in the sand, hand in hand,
Skirts fluttering like coloured flags,
Like flying fish, one second in the sun.
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