Ferry Crossing
Past ponds, the cinder black track
from Denaby crunches
to the river
Whose creased cooling drift
slakes and waves the free green fronds
“This way to the sea” they sigh.
And a pulley scrolls and rattles in the foremast
At the bank, we await embarkment
On the boat, they await alighting,
tension enough to haul the boat across…
or freeze it in deadlock
Big Buttoned tweeds and hooded duffle-coats
floral prints on shirts that fail to conceal vests
Short trousers, hats and pipes
pigeon baskets, satchels and wellies idly wait
and people clutch their pennies
and ha’pennies
that coppersmell and burn in sweaty palms
And the patina black
can be dug away by mindless fingernails
revealing those faded, royal mushes
averting their indifferent gaze
(Why Georgivs? Why not George?)
The boot-rubbed dusty deck, with unswept timbers
grits and scrunches underfoot
“Get up” barks mum
correcting my facial filth with a painful hankie
And a whippet cringes at her voice
Travel-worn gunwhales and river-niff
welcome fingers and noses
To the duck-dabbled raft
The Huckleberry Craft
The Mississippi Muse
The corn-pipe, horn-pipe
river’s dream
We boarded, swimming into the past
and rather than cast-off, or even castaway,
we slough off with the nonchalance of a bored boatman, and
No engine putts a burbled wake
no motor heaves a listing thrust, but
A weathered hand-over-hand plies the life-creased line,
and tugs at the knot,
that anchors Old Denaby to Mexborough
shuffling one nearer, the other further -
whichever destination looms
Avoiding the snatch-away weir by a mere rope’s twist
the low-slung, slow-swung boat
bails and sails
Into a time beyond the radio
Hearts broke,
and night-soil sighed
Of tanneries,
and mining disasters
preachers and school masters
cadaverous floods
And bull-rush buffeted,
bird-sung, bell-rung, sussurant summers
Who might have sailed their last “tara”
chasing industrial work, to shuttle in woven woolstink
Or bathe in boiling steel’s orange light?
I feel a gentle wooden thud
“Are you getting off then?” asks mum
with a plastic basket shopping bag
And we head past the church,
crowded round with the buried dead
and emerge in Mexborough Market
With tortoise, and cabbage, and nails by the pound
and crockery to shout about,
and fruit shouting twice as loud