<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The poems below are from a variety of sources.\u00a0 The list will expand as new, local sea poetry is submitted.\u00a0 The authors:<\/p>\n

Rose M. DiMaria (1921-1998) was the daughter of Philip Parisi, Captain of the Rose and Lucy.<\/em> In 1945 she married\u00a0Paul “The Gentleman” DiMaria, who fished on many boats, including the Rose and Lucy<\/em> and St. Peter III.<\/em>\u00a0 Besides raising a family, Rose worked for many years at O’Donnell Usen Fisheries as a fish packer.\u00a0 Rose’s daughter, Lee Swekla, provided Sea Breezes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Background on John Ronan is given elsewhere on this website.\u00a0 The Salt of Gloucester <\/em>was written in the winter of 2009 after the January sinking of the fishing vessel Patriot<\/em> and the loss of both crew members, Giovanni Orlando and Matteo Russo.<\/p>\n

Though landlocked for her entire life, in Amherst, MA, Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) wrote a number of sea poems.<\/p>\n

T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) spent summers in Gloucester as a boy; The Dry Salvages,<\/em> the third in the series of four related poems titled The Four Quartets, <\/em>draws on that boyhood background.\u00a0 The Dry Salvages are a low-lying rock formation off Cape Ann and in the text, Salvages<\/em> is pronounced to rhyme with assuages<\/em>.\u00a0 (A “groaner” is a whistling buoy; Eliot uses British spellings.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sea Breezes<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Rose DiMaria<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The sea breezes off Pavilion Beach<\/p>\n

Are the things one dreams of when asleep,<\/p>\n

To know that you were there<\/p>\n

Is a beautiful dream beyond compare.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Boats are sailing in the night,<\/p>\n

Harbor lights that shine so bright<\/p>\n

As the fishermen of the sea<\/p>\n

See the things we do not see.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When dawn comes, the nets they’ll throw.<\/p>\n

What they catch they do not know<\/p>\n

But in their hearts filled with hope<\/p>\n

They want plenty of fish as they pull the rope.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Starfish, Dogfish, Whiting, too.<\/p>\n

Nets are torn, more work to do.<\/p>\n

On their knees they start to mend<\/p>\n

So they can set their nets again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Today they’re rich, tomorrow poor,<\/p>\n

The life of a fisherman to explore.<\/p>\n

They work so hard day and night<\/p>\n

God bless the fishermen, let them see light.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Their families at home are waiting to hear<\/p>\n

The master’s step to know he’s near.<\/p>\n

With a box of fish upon his back,<\/p>\n

‘Tis a fisherman’s story, that’s a fact.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It’s night again and time to reach<\/p>\n

For dreams again of Pavilion Beach.<\/p>\n

This dream you know I really do see<\/p>\n

For the fisherman belongs to me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Salt of Gloucester<\/h1>\n

by John J. Ronan<\/p>\n

In memory of Giovanni Battista Orlando and Matteo Russo <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The sea is salt because the sea is sorrow,<\/p>\n

As ships and men, none last or alone,<\/p>\n

Are lost and the names tolled like sorrowful mysteries<\/p>\n

In churches in harbors on the grief-got sea:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patriot,<\/em> a night in early January, founders<\/p>\n

In strange, quick catastrophe. Alarms sound.<\/p>\n

Friends first, a worried brother, rush<\/p>\n

Out to the unguarded waters in urgent search<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For two good and loving, loved men,<\/p>\n

Full of humor and hard work, fishermen<\/p>\n

And family both, a father and son-in-law,<\/p>\n

Orlando, Russo, on the closely-woven boat.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At home, wives pray and wait, pain<\/p>\n

Like held breath as lapstraked love braces<\/p>\n

The same waves, faith-focused, growing<\/p>\n

Fear fended off with faith and hope.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hard news breaks. Strangers and friends,<\/p>\n

Networks of city neighbors, gather to mend<\/p>\n

Themselves with prayer, to talk, to mourn together,<\/p>\n

Weep and feed the sea with the salt of Gloucester,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yet recall how wonderfully faith says late:<\/p>\n

Giovanni Battista and Matteo, already raised<\/p>\n

Gracefully from the grieving sea, stand at dawn<\/p>\n

Together, hand-in-hand, already home.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Shipwreck<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Emily Dickinson<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A little brig I knew, —<\/p>\n

O’ertook by blast,<\/p>\n

It spun and spun,<\/p>\n

And groped delirious, for morn.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It slipped and slipped,<\/p>\n

As one that drunken stepped;<\/p>\n

Its white foot tripped,<\/p>\n

Then dropped from sight.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ah, brig, good-night<\/p>\n

To crew and you;<\/p>\n

The ocean’s heart too smooth, too blue,<\/p>\n

To break for you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

****************************************<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Dry Salvages<\/strong><\/p>\n

By T. S. Eliot<\/p>\n

I<\/strong><\/p>\n

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
\nIs a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,
\nPatient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
\nUseful, untrustworthy, as a conveyer of commerce;
\nThen only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
\nThe problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
\nBy the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable,
\nKeeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
\nOf what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
\nBy worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
\nHis rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
\nIn the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
\nIn the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
\nAnd the evening circle in the winter gaslight.<\/p>\n

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
\nThe sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
\nInto which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
\nIts hints of earlier and other creation:
\nThe starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
\nThe pools where it offers to our curiosity
\nThe more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
\nIt tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
\nThe shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
\nAnd the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
\nMany gods and many voices.
\nThe salt is on the briar rose,
\nThe fog is in the fir trees.
\nThe sea howl
\nAnd the sea yelp, are different voices
\nOften together heard: the whine in the rigging,
\nThe menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
\nThe distant rote in the granite teeth,
\nAnd the wailing warning from the approaching headland
\nAre all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
\nRounded homewards, and the seagull:
\nAnd under the oppression of the silent fog
\nThe tolling bell
\nMeasures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
\nGround swell, a time
\nOlder than the time of chronometers, older
\nThan time counted by anxious worried women
\nLying awake, calculating the future,
\nTrying to unweave, unwind, unravel
\nAnd piece together the past and the future,
\nBetween midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
\nThe future futureless, before the morning watch
\nWhen time stops and time is never ending;
\nAnd the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
\nClangs
\nThe bell.<\/p>\n

II<\/strong><\/p>\n

Where is there an end to it, the soundless wailing,
\nThe silent withering of autumn flowers
\nDropping their petals and remaining motionless;
\nWhere is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
\nThe prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
\nPrayer at the calamitous annunciation?<\/p>\n

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
\nConsequence of further days and hours,
\nWhile emotion takes to itself the emotionless
\nYears of living among the breakage
\nOf what was believed in as the most reliable –
\nAnd therefore the fittest for renunciation.<\/p>\n

There is the final addition, the failing
\nPride or resentment at failing powers,
\nThe unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
\nIn a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
\nThe silent listening to the undeniable
\nClamour of the bell of the last annunciation.<\/p>\n

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
\nInto the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?
\nWe cannot think of a time that is oceanless
\nOr of an ocean not littered with wastage
\nOr of a future that is not liable
\nLike the past, to have no destination.<\/p>\n

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
\nSetting and hauling, while the North East lowers
\nOver shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
\nOr drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
\nNot as making a trip that will be unpayable
\nFor a haul that will not bear examination.<\/p>\n

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
\nNo end to the withering of withered flowers,
\nTo the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
\nTo the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
\nThe bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
\nPrayer of the one Annunciation.<\/p>\n

It seems, as one becomes older,
\nThat the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence –
\nOr even development: the latter a partial fallacy
\nEncouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
\nWhich becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
\nThe moments of happiness – not the sense of well-being,
\nFruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
\nOr even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination –
\nWe had the experience but missed the meaning,
\nAnd approach to the meaning restores the experience
\nIn a different form, beyond any meaning
\nWe can assign to happiness. I have said before
\nThat the past experience revived in the meaning
\nIs not the experience of one life only
\nBut of many generations – not forgetting
\nSomething that is probably quite ineffable:
\nThe backward look behind the assurance
\nOf recorded history, the backward half-look
\nOver the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
\nNow, we come to discover that the moments of agony
\n(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
\nHaving hopes for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
\nIs not the question) are likewise permanent
\nWith such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
\nIn the agony of others, nearly experienced,
\nInvolving ourselves, than in our own.
\nFor our own past is covered by the currents of action,
\nBut the torment of others remains an experience
\nUnqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
\nPeople change, and smile: but the agony abides.
\nTime the destroyer is time the preserver,
\nLike the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
\nThe bitter apple and the bite in the apple.
\nAnd the ragged rock in the restless waters,
\nWaves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
\nOn a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
\nIn navigable weather it is always a seamark
\nTo lay a course by: but in the sombre season
\nOr the sudden fury; is what it always was.<\/p>\n

III<\/strong><\/p>\n

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant –
\nAmong other things – or one way of putting the same thing:
\nThat the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
\nOf wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
\nPressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
\nAnd the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
\nYou cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
\nThat time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
\nWhen the train starts, and the passengers are settled
\nTo fruit, periodicals and business letters
\n(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
\nTheir faces relax from grief into relief,
\nTo the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
\nFare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
\nInto different lives, or into any future;
\nYou are not the same people who left the station
\nOr who will arrive at any terminus,
\nWhile the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
\nAnd on the deck of the drumming liner
\nWatching the furrow that widens behind you,
\nYou shall not think ‘the past is finished’
\nOr ‘the future is before us’.
\nAt nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial
\nIs a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
\nThe murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
\n‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
\nYou are not those who saw the harbour
\nReceding, or those who will disembark,
\nHere between the hither and the farther shore
\nWhile time is withdrawn, consider the future
\nAnd the past with an equal mind.
\nAt the moment which is not of action or inaction
\nYou can receive this: “on whatever sphere of being
\nThe mind of man may be intent
\nAt the time of death” – that is the one action
\n(And the time of death is every moment)
\nWhich shall fructify in the lives of others:
\nAnd do not think of the fruit of action.
\nFare forward.
\nO voyagers, O seamen,
\nYou who come to port, and you whose bodies
\nWill suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
\nOr whatever event, this is your real destination.’
\nSo Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
\nOn the field of battle.
\nNot fare well,
\nBut fare forward, voyagers.<\/p>\n

IV<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
\nPray for all those who are in ships, those
\nWhose business has to do with fish, and
\nThose concerned with every lawful traffic
\nAnd those who conduct them.<\/p>\n

Repeat a prayer also on behalf of
\nWomen who have seen their sons or husbands
\nSetting forth, and not returning:
\nFiglia del tuo figlio,
\nQueen of Heaven.<\/p>\n

Also pray for those who were in ships, and
\nEnded their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips
\nOr in the dark throat which will not reject them
\nOr wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell’s
\nPerpetual angelus.<\/p>\n

V<\/strong><\/p>\n

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
\nTo report the behaviour of the sea monster,
\nDescribe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
\nObserve disease in signatures, evoke
\nBiography from the wrinkles of the palm
\nAnd tragedy from fingers; release omens
\nBy sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
\nWith playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
\nOr barbituric acids, or dissect
\nThe recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors –
\nTo explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
\nPastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
\nAnd always will be, some of them especially
\nWhen there is distress of nations and perplexity
\nWhether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
\nMen’s curiosity searches past and future
\nAnd clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
\nThe point of intersection of the timeless
\nWith time, is an occupation for the saint –
\nNo occupation either, but something given
\nAnd taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
\nArdour and selflessness and self-surrender.
\nFor most of us, there is only the unattended
\nMoment, the moment in and out of time,
\nThe distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
\nThe wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
\nOr the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
\nThat it is not heard at all, but you are the music
\nWhile the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
\nHints followed by guesses; and the rest
\nIs prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
\nThe hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
\nHere the impossible union
\nOf spheres of existence is actual,
\nHere the past and future
\nAre conquered, and reconciled,
\nWhere action were otherwise movement
\nOf that which is only moved
\nAnd has in it no source of movement –
\nDriven by daemonic, chthonic
\nPowers. And right action is freedom
\nFrom past and future also.
\nFor most of us, this is the aim
\nNever here to be realised;
\nWho are only undefeated
\nBecause we have gone on trying;
\nWe, content at the last
\nIf our temporal reversion nourish
\n(Not too far from the yew-tree)
\nThe life of significant soil.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The poems below are from a variety of sources.\u00a0 The list will expand as new, local sea poetry is submitted.\u00a0 The authors: Rose M. DiMaria (1921-1998) was the daughter of Philip Parisi, Captain of the Rose and Lucy. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-104","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n