I'd like to read two poems from Grand Manan
Island in the Bay of Fundy.
It's a working, fishing island, about 2,500 residents.
Been about 2,500 residents for 200 years;
it doesn't go up or down.
It's all dependent on the fishery.
And as you all may know, commercial fishing
is the highest risk occupation on Earth.
And the people who fish are wise, and brave, and tough
and go out in any condition.
And even with the diminishing results in the seas,
I have great, great admiration for the fishermen
on this island.
They're mostly men.
Very few women are fish up there, unlike in Alaska.
But there also are deaths.
And not every year, but frequently enough,
that it's part of the landscape of the place,
that boats go down and people drown.
And I wanted to write a poem in honor of one
of these young guys who died at sea.
And this poem was written shortly
after the death of the great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney,
and so it kind of rips off some gestures and language
from Heaney.
You might recognize that in the poem, those
of you who know his work.
"The Drowned Man."
"Some week when the roof leaks and the cat
has been carried off by the fox when my brother's scans sparkle
with lesions when someone hates me for the good deed I've done
and it's impossible to sleep or wake up,
I will return to the island to see its blue and lavender
rocks.
I will stare at the ocean a long time,
thinking of the man lost at sea who clung to a sheet of plywood
after his fishing boat went down,
his jeans so heavy with water, his hands so cold with cold
that he had to let go and go down.
Trove of the fishers lost to the deep, the holy seabed scattered
with wrecks nothing but bones and boots laid out
on the scuttle ground after the benthic gleaners have gone,
the sad nets coming up empty laden with such loss
that his people can only shake their heads and gear up
for another day of work.
Something of their faith may come to me
if I stare all day at the churn and pull of fearsome tides,
the tweeded surface of the bay.
I'll know whatever I suffer is small on the scale of what
people are made to live through.
A net of words holds a place together
and those who are broken are lifted home."