Julia Casterton: Señor Lobelinos
Julia Casterton
Señor Lobelinos
We sit over his nets. He doesn’t fish now but
sometimes he sits with the nets
in the fishermen’s house on the lonxa.
Somehow we talk a little
me with my small gallego, he with his small English
among the nets.
The fishermen leave for the fish, he says.
They take the currents they’ve always taken
to the New World, for the cod,
for the hake. The secret routes
sailed by the Basques, the Gallegans,
long before Columbus.
And often they make another life
away from the rains of Galicia,
leaving their families on the calle des emigrantes
for a softer life away from here.
Señor Lobelinos has not done this.
He always returned with his catch
and now his daughter is a lawyer in Santiago,
his wife is round and happy. I ask him
What is his best moment, in his life with the fish.
In Canada, he tells me.
In a bar I heard my own name spoken
by an old man on a corner chair.
He was my grandfather. We were there
the whole afternoon. That was when I knew
that the bitter season means nothing
because though the sea draws us out
and we are scattered,
there is a magnet at the root of the world
that lands us together face to face.
(Magma Poetry competition winner, 2006)
The poet and teacher Julia Casterton heard the news that she had won a national competition for poems based on the word "fishing" a week before her death at the age of 54. Read the obituary for Julia Casterton in the Guardian.
(for daisy, who was taking a class with her at the time of her death)
Comments