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Cape Verde

CENSUS

At midnight on Sunday the 3rd of April

1881 the Bar lightship’s

paddle steamer tender, ‘Vigilant’,

is moored at Woodside Stage, Birkenhead.

Of the eight crew three were born in Wales,

two in Liverpool, one in Ireland,

one in Sweden and one on a ‘Yorkshire Farm’.

In immaculate copperplate, the First Mate,

my great grandfather, completes the form.

 

Meanwhile at 52 Harlow Street,

a street that slopes down to Harrington Dock,

where the Elder Dempster line was based

that sailed to Freetown, Accra and Lagos,

are his wife, Rebecca, and their five children –

on the opposite bank of the Mersey.

 

The oldest, Esther, is my grandmother.

She is nine. I remember her as

an old lady in black with no teeth,

who told me stories about her family.

So what she is like this April Sunday

I can only guess: dark, curly hair; her face

already shadowed by her mother’s drinking.

 

Her brother, George, four, will go to sea

like his Da. In 1915, the ship

he will captain – bound for Liverpool

from Lagos – will be torpedoed off

Cape Verde. From choice he will go down with it.

 

The sombre curlicues of his father’s script

are preserved forever.

 

 

 

AUGUST 4TH 2014

An exceptionally sunny, cloudless day

has packed Benllech Beach at low water

with hundreds of gaudy strangers. Meanwhile,

the pomp begins and ‘sacrifice’ is talked of

as if the lambs themselves had chosen it.

 

On the clear horizon, container ships

and oil tankers are hoved to, waiting

for high water so they can safely clear

the Liverpool Bar – a compacted sandbank –

something I have seen many times but

only now recall a great grand father,

retired from sailing ‘coffin ships’ to Boston,

was captain of the Bar lightship. He died

before the century turned so never saw

his oldest son earn his Master’s Ticket

nor learn he had chosen to go down

with his ship, torpedoed off Cape Verde.

 

As the waters rise the fainthearted leave.

The inexorable ships steer east.

The day will end with Sir Edward Grey’s

metaphor of the lamps made fatuous.

 

 

 

VIRTUTIS FORTUNA COMES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read357 views
Stepping Stones, Kettlewell © Sylvia Selzer 2007

 

Lasting longer than the Thirty Years War,

than half our biblical shelf life, this marriage

has grown like coral – drops of the slain

Medusa’s blood – become, like Corallium

Nobile, a charm against fits, poison,

sorcery, whirlwind, lightning, fire, shipwreck!

From Norway’s fjords to the Cape Verde isles,

the Niger’s delta to the Orinoco’s,

reefs build, decline: the slow massing of

defunct algae, discarded oyster shells, lost

sailors’ bones; the unmarked ebb and flow

of topless towers, clayey tenements.

So, let’s celebrate chance, charity, courage –

Fortune’s inexorable comrades.

 

 

 

VIRTUTIS FORTUNA COMES

Stepping Stones, Kettlewell © SCES 2007


Lasting longer than the Thirty Years War,

than half our biblical shelf life, this marriage

has grown like coral – drops of the slain

Medusa’s blood – become, like Corallium

Nobile, a charm against fits, poison,

sorcery, whirlwind, lightning, fire, shipwreck!


From Norway’s fjords to the Cape Verde isles,

the Niger’s delta to the Orinoco’s,

reefs build, decline: the slow massing of

defunct algae, discarded oyster shells, lost

sailors’ bones; the unmarked ebb and flow

of topless towers, clayey tenements.


So, let’s celebrate chance, charity, courage –

Fortune’s inexorable comrades.