Blog - Wednesday Poems

Image: “After breakfast and for the rest of the day we were greasing the ventilators to make them easier to turn. Took them all off and scraped old grease off. Then we red leaded the inside of them. I had Tim take a picture of me inside cowl of one.” (Jack Shreve, Journal entry, April 29,1936.)

My friend Pam Galloway (a fine poet!) sent me a lovely note last week from her home in Manchester, England. She belongs to a poetry appreciation group, which she explained is “one of the offerings of the U3A which is ‘University of the Third Age’, a national organisation which brings people of retirement age together to share their talents and skills.”  Since they were to meet the day after Labour Day, their theme was work.  And Pam’s contribution to the discussion was one of the poems from my book, Waiting for the Albatross (Oolichan), a collection of poems I crafted using segments from the diary my father, Jack Shreve, wrote at age 21 while working on a tramp freighter during the Great Depression (for more about this book, check out my Books page).  So, with thanks to Pam for that honour, and to celebrate Labour Day (a few days after the fact), this week’s Wednesday Poem is On Hands and Knees.

On Hands and Knees

This life isn’t all it's cracked up to be –
painting with cement wash
on hands and knees;
red leading all day, then

more painting with cement wash.
Not an exceptionally hard job
to red lead the ventilators –
but dirty as hell.

Not an exceptionally hard job to soak rags
in “transmission grease”, either –
but dirty as hell,
oiling decks and steam pipes.

We soak rags in “transmission grease”
and apply with vigour
when oiling decks and steam pipes.
Chipped rust off the forepeak bulkhead

then with vigour
cleaned coal out of winches and
chipped more rust and paint in forepeak.
Filthy dirty, clothes and everything to-night.
 

Cleaned coal out of winches,
soogeed bridge and midship decks.
Filthy dirty, clothes and everything to-night.
Had a bath after supper, in a bucket!

Soogeed bridge and midship decks
on hands and knees;
had a bath after supper, in a bucket.
This life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

A couple of notes about terms used in this poem:  Cement wash is a cement mixture used to protect steel from salt water corrosion. Red lead is a paint compound containing lead tetroxide (which is highly toxic), that was used as a rust inhibitor on iron and steel.  Soogee is a cleaning product.

On Hands and Knees is a pantoum, one of my favourite poetic forms. As with most of the poems in this book, forms featuring refrains were my go-to approach, as I felt they worked well as a metaphor for the repetitive nature of life at sea. I particularly like the way the refrains in a pantoum cascade down through the stanzas with a kind of rocking motion. Here, I was a bit loose with the refrains, varying them when it suited the narrative of the poem.  The repetition pattern for a pantoum is: lines 2 and 4 of the first stanza become lines 1 and 3 of the next, and so on to the end, where lines 3 and 1 of the first stanza become lines 2 and 4 of the last, so the poem ends as it begins – but with that final line containing so much more than it did at the start. For more about this form, and other examples of how several other poets have approached it, see In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Caitlin) which Kate Braid and I co-edited.