Nicholas Messenger - Cockle Fishing lyrics

It is a particular onion-coloured haze toward the zenith paled, and the water flats sustain its sheen, the world one tone. Toward the land bank, down before the dim mill-drums a spire's streak and some tents of roofs. The distant sand yachts, tinted, flit and drains' ends spill themselves to coil into the light. Among the co*kle-rakers, out there with a bucket, scratching like an oyster catcher. Barnacle-encrusted fish traps palings stretch, black basket-work stockades, for vague kilometres, their funnels full of slime, mercurial; and cage necks squirming with thick, mottled, jetting cuttlefish. From outlooks such, towards the sea some miles beyond, unseen in the obscuring mist, the mussel fences loom in file while inward trudge the fishermen before the silver feelers of returning tide, fore-warned by the appearing gulls, in this light the insubstance of a vision. We are the sentinels, who stand out over time: the forests that once harboured bandits felled in the millennial plains still pa**ing in their phantom ranks, like the platoons of ruffians who marched to wage that war for wages, and now seem to march forever on the muddy waste they laid. The scattered pairs of mussel-pickers and fishermen with silhouettes of sacks and poles who home through stockade watches, splash unclear : survivors, or perhaps surviving ghosts of that defeat, that trooped back home from battle with the victory; and sea crept at their heels among the troops of boles. Unfocussed, swallowed in the inconclusive years, the vast trekked fenced and sentried age, to time's uncertain vantages they offer their laborious tread and heavy harvest; throwing up the short defences to retreat from; digging into trenches behind ramparts for the tide to cross and drown. The bogged van carcases they leave behind in pools sink, and become the rank, bizarre metropolis of barnacles; the plastic rotting park-lands of sea lettuces; the haunt of snails and hunt of rapes of small delinquent gangs of crabs. At most, another nation founded upon rot.