Author’s Note: “Fisherman Blues” is part of a collection of sonnets about the North Sea and the English Channel. They developed during several summers that I spent on the Belgian coast in the city of Ostend and in Northern France in economically declining fishing towns like Boulogne-Sur-Mer during and in the wake of Brexit. The poem takes the perspective of one of the North Sea’s most contested assets, fish, and repeats a one syllable Sanskrit mantra ‘hrim’ pronounced ‘hreem’. Like the mantra ‘om’ it reflects unity, oneness, and shared wisdom—both lost to humans and nation-states focused on territorializing coastal waters. The poem’s title and closing couplet reflect the despair and deprivation in once thriving seaside fishing communities caused by neglectful governments, but the last line suggests that there is hope for renewal.
Fisherman Blues
Trawling through unclaimed waters,
before Her Majesty’s court jesters in waiting
(for a referendum) can ask: can a fish be British, Belgian,
French or Dutch? Fluent in Flounder, Carp or Cod?
Fish know the answer—swimming unbounded through
shoreless seas. They share the same syllable: hrim
which ripples through undelineated waters until
fishermen, hot on its trail, trawl a line in the sea.
Once the war has broken and treaties drawn
only then do the fishermen know the wisdom of
their prey. Ocean is to sea as sea is to river as
river is to rain. The tacit law of hrim carried by wind.
Your empty nets and bank accounts. Fallow towns and
empty market stalls. The day you learned to hum hrim.
♦
Sara Atwater grew up in Washington, D.C. She completed a BA in German and English at UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in education from the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. She taught secondary school English for fifteen years. Currently, Atwater is working on a PhD at Maastricht University (Netherlands). She lives in Brussels, Belgium with her partner and their two children.
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