Two Shipwrecks and a Slip of a Girl
A bit of a departure for our Lifeboat Made of Words...
Two Shipwrecks and a Slip of a Girl
It wasn’t April when my ship put in at Cobh.
I had no idea about the shadow cast there in 1912
by the Titanic. Nor sensed the shades of the doomed Irish
who climbed aboard then, where I’d just disembarked.
I was twenty-one, a slip of a girl
following fairy-lights further and further away
from what I’d ever called home.
Strange to think this was forty-nine years ago.
The nearly new ship flew a Soviet flag. For two hundred bucks,
still possessed of a student I.D., I crossed the sea
from New York to Ireland, where the offer of a place to stay
awaited me. A place to start what I hoped would be my life as a writer.
I had a ridiculous boyfriend in tow. An heiress I’d met in New Mexico—
someone living out her own doomed romance in a desert hovel—
found promise, I guess, in the stories and poems I read to her,
and liked the Child ballads I sang while I played my guitar.
With a hug, as I left to drive the rest of the way to New York,
she said that she had a cottage and tower in West County Cork.
I’ve always wanted to let a young writer live there, she told me,
as if spun whole cloth from a fantasy.
Write to me when you’re ready, and I’ll tell you how to reach
Mr. Hoolihan, the grocer who also drives a taxi. He can take you
to Ardfield from Clonakilty and give you the key to the cottage.
I’ll never forget what she did for me, forty-nine years ago.
The Mikhail Lermontov—a twenty-ton ship, twelve decks high—
was too large to make land in the harbor at Cobh. My suitcase in one hand,
guitar in the other, my long black hair blew athwart my face and I
found my place aboard the tender, among the Irish returning home.
The farewells called out by our new-found friends left behind
were drowned in the blast of the ship’s horn on that starry night.
Streamers were launched from the topmost rails
and our little boat’s first mate cast off the lines.
A passenger took out a tin whistle and played a tune
as the tillerman steered us toward the glimmer of the town—
and I felt a sense of sadness that seemed not my own.
It can take us a lifetime to know what we know.
Was it my present-day self I sensed, my black hair turned gray
as I hurtle through the final part of my life to an unknown shore?
Or was it the shades of those Irish who drowned that day in 1912,
looking to hitch a ride back to their homeland?
Or was it the future shipwreck of the Mikhail Lermontov,
sensed by an unwanted, witchy antenna inside of me?
No one yet knew that, eleven years hence, the ship would run aground
and sink in the Marlborough Sounds of New Zealand.
My sense of dread was short-lived, gone by the time we stepped ashore.
I set about finding a place for us to spend the night
and was helped by the local garda who gave me the coin I needed
to make a call, saying, as he did so, Welcome to Ireland!
It can take us a lifetime to know what we know.
Strange to think this was forty-nine years ago.
Copyright © 2024 by Barbara QuickSandy Yannone and Kim Ports Parsons, founders of the Facebook poetry group CULTIVATING VOICES LIVE, invited me to read in a hybrid event last Sunday, April 14, out of Cobh, County Cork, Ireland, commemorating the doomed maiden voyage of the Titanic. Cobh Harbor was the Titanic's final port of call. As it happens, Cobh plays a special role in my personal history—and I had material at hand for a new poem. This is the revised version of the poem I read on Sunday.
Next week, I’ll post a new installment of Boardinghouse Reach.
