Sara Fielder - The Shipwrights

Each morning on the docks I'd rise
At dawn 'round six-fifteen
Throw on some clothes and splash my face
And brush my teeth real clean
With aching bones
I'd bend and stretch
My muscles stiff and sore
From nailing planks and pounding seams
I'd caulked the day before

The bicycle was rusty
Locked inside the parking lot
And as I rode to work I'd think
Of tools I had forgot
A putty knife for scraping
Sharpened chisel or the plane?
But weariness prevented me
From turning round again

The auger, level, or the saw
In tool bag they would be
Unless I'd loaned them to a friend
In which case I would see
Him in the yard that morning
Waiting for me by the store
Where we would get some coffee
Just like me all stiff and sore

With cream and sugar in our cups
We'd plan the day ahead
Mull things over, chew the fat
Until our brains went dead
'Did you bring two part epoxy? '
'There's a leak around the skeg'.
But he was tired and in reply
He said 'I thought you did'

Then we would cross the boat yard
Just like many times before
With the smell of all the hardwoods
From the sawdust on the floor
And once it struck our nostrils
We began to come alive
There was one that smelled like chocolate
One like honey from the hive

She was over in a corner
Standing up on twenty jacks
Her hull was made of douglas fir
Her keel was painted black
Her insides were mahogany
Her decks were grayish blue
And it had been our task at hand
To making her brand new

It'd taken twenty months or so
Perhaps a little more
But at this point we didn't care
And who was keeping score?
And on the day we launched her
With a bottle of pink Dom
We asked the God's to keep her safe
While we kept working on


Written by Sara Fielder © 2011

Sara Fielder

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