Paintings in the Maritime Museum show this stretch of river
full of sailing ships coming in on the tide, sailors
jigging on deck at the sight of steeples, inns, blank
warehouses with doors waiting to close
on their cargo.
Looking up from the dockside I see descendents of clerks,
hornpipers, and porters gawping from French windows
where hoists once hung, at lancets cut to light
vaults for cotton, grain, palm oil,
and guano.
A low estuary sun limes their faces, silhouettes the sea-grey
destroyer sliding downriver, sheet steel blind,
shipping no movement save where the ocean’s bluster
leads her white ensign
in a tango.
Arthur Haswell lives in Northumberland, England. This poem containing imagery from the Mersey River port on England’s west shore gives echoes of Maine’s maritime past and ancestry.