Today, there was no threat of weather in the captain’s eye,
So, the sergeant ferry forded the harbour with shoulders back,
Sparkling through its secret easements of way,
Past a boy who was coiled like a languid worm
At the end of a jetty,
Dawdling his rod in the waters,
Playing patience with the sea;
And past the turtle-back dinghies
Stashed in their secret covies,
Towards the wharf at Woolwich.
These promontories and spits of land
That wend their ways into Sydney Harbour
Are haunted, still, by the ghosts of lean, manacled men
Who were kept in inventories to endure,
Stooped to life under the chain of sentence,
And commanded to build walls
In stone the colour of wounded flesh.
Now the land is prosperously grassed,
The walls aligned in a pinch of domestic privacies.
And so, we stepped our land-legs
On to the Woolwich pontoon-
A small sea-house for waiting in-
That was charted with timetables and ordinances.
At the ferry’s bump the pontoon dipped in curtsey
As the ferrymen
Lugged land and water close,
And there was a swooning in our knees
As we made our way aboard.
As the ferry made its crossing
Through a late flotilla of yachts
And their wake of tired conversations,
We heard the call of a high, homing seabird,
And, from Cockatoo Island,
The whooping cough of a venerable machine
Fading in the remnants of its shift.
Finally at dusk, we rounded the last point,
And there,
Above the staunch ramparts of stone,
In the arc of a children’s metronome,
Reared the great mythology of steel
That spans, in majesty,
All vessels and talk that are harboured here.
In the fading of the light,
The land seemed but parenthesis
Between the water and the sky,
As a late regatta of seabirds
Chalked with white the evening’s grey,
Beating the bounds of dusk.