How bizarre…I just wrote two songs on the subject, fairly convinced that they were tapping a hitherto unmined resource. I'm about to record one, 'Davy Cross' a sad but true story told to me in Flamborough many years ago. The latter, 'Five Whalebones', I include for your delectation.

FIVE WHALEBONES

The fisherwife has spilled her blood upon the moonlit shore
And cries out to the howling gale amid the ocean's roar
'Oh bring me back my son!" she screams, the seagull's mocking cry
Screams back, 'See now where love must end,
For those who brave the sea shall surely die!'

        Five whalebones chatter as dolphins do
        Five whalebones twist the yarn
        Five whalebones whisper the fisherwife's prayer
        All to keep her men from harm

Late in the night there came a knock upon her cottage door
And standing there an owl-eyed girl, she'd never seen before
'I heard your call', the maiden said, 'across the wind and foam,
I bear a gift of life, a charm
To bind your loved ones fast to hearth and home'.

And in that lonely cottage then, throughout the stormy night
The maiden taught, the wife she learned by fire and candlelight
When grey dawn came, the maid had gone but there upon the floor
A seawife's charm, a mystery
That brings the fisherman safe home to shore

Five were the whalebone shards she took and sea-dark was the yarn
Five times five the knots and twists to keep her man from harm
Blue was the shirt she made her man, a garment strong and proud
An endless thread for the quick and dead
For the fisherman's shirt is also the fisherman's shroud

And so it is when wind is shrill and screams a banshee cry
The fishermen go down to the sea in shirts of deep blue dye
With cables, nets and anchors twined within that endless skein
They take the sailor out to sea
And bring him, dead or living, home again.


P. Davenport © Feb 2010