[Harry Nicholson]

Passage Through Bab el Mandeb

(A memory of the Brocklebank steamer
SS Marwarri in 1960)

The steam turbine throbs down the Red
Sea road, through the oiled steel deck,
the rust-streaked hull, in the dreaded
dripping sweat of the Red Sea road.

You have never seen such colour,
it’s a molten sea of brass, splashed
across with mazarine, and Mocha
burns in orange low away to port.

The sky, blinding at the zenith,
fades into asses milk along the horizon,
across the ovens of Punt,
Eritrea and the Sudan.

Javelins in volleys -
flying fish pursued by nightmares -
break surface, trailing
necklaces of silver.

Then, like salamanders dancing
in a furnace, tortured islands
rise up twisted dead ahead -
shimmering anvils of the sun.

Vapours exude
out of long-dead mahogany.
Decades of varnish soften
and creep down bulkheads.

The banded funnel exhales
black smoke in rippled pulses
that hover, then drift away astern.
The phosphor-bronze screw thuds out


the passage of time. But
the crew are ghosts in history now,
scraps of memory, as the old ship glides
through the Gates of Weeping.


Begun 2003, revised Oct 2010 for the Brocklebank Reunion.

Harry Nicholson, one-time radio officer, SS Marwarri.

(Bab el Mandeb translates: “Gates of Weeping” - these are the straits at the southern end of the Red Sea across which slaves were carried out of Africa to the markets of Arabia)