Hooked
I stuffed my hook in a ragworm’s jaws,
caught a glum goby with a ground line,
hooked peacock rockfish, cats-meat pollack,
spinning with the twins off The White Rock.
With a sun-thawed, severed sandeel head,
I foul-hooked fighting green-boned garfish
on a short-traced float from the lighthouse.
From boats I dragged foil, feathers, bare hooks
past ravenous packs of mackerel.
I heard spider crabs skitter on deck,
saw lobsters lobbed out from lobster pots
went home to the kitchen scream of crabs.
Now I fish for something I can’t describe.
I wait for the ormer skies of sundown,
my fine line curving somewhere out of sight,
its weightless trace baited with silence.
Peter Kenny’s pamphlet The Nightwork (2014) was published by Telltale Press. His Guernsey poems The Boy Who Fell Upwards appeared in A Guernsey Double (2010). He also writes words for music, plays and prose www.peterkenny.co.uk