by Greg McInerney
Beneath a red sunset over Clew Bay, the little wooden boat, battered by years of salt and sorrow, slipped away from the quays of Westport, its sails patched with blankets, its hull heavy with secret farewells. On board were three siblings.
They left not for greed nor adventure, but because the potato fields had turned to dust, and the roofs of famine-starved villages echoed with hollow moans. The salt air tasted of dying hopes, but in their hearts glowed a fragile light, the promise of survival, of new land across the sea, where hunger might loosen its grip.
Night after night they pitched through the Atlantic, steering by memory and the flicker of distant stars. The chest creaked with their dreams: a roof made of wood instead of hunger; the laughter of children; the smell of turf fires on a winter’s evening.
Then came the storm, a ragged beast of westerly wind and rain, clawing at their fragile vessel. The oars splintered, the mast cracked like a dry bone, and the sea swallowed their hope in froth and thunder.
When dawn broke, all was still. The boat, that humble ark of grief and longing, had drifted upon a hidden rock beside a lonely island. No one remained alive to see land.
The boat lay stranded, crooked and silent, as if exhaling its final breath. Over decades, seaweed wound round its sails.
Yet some nights, locals say, when the fog lies low, you can see its ghost: a pale hull gliding just offshore, flickering with candlelight. You hear distant whispers in an old Gaelic dialect: prayers for those lost to hunger, songs of home, and the ache of dreams drowned in salt water.
That stranded craft becomes a monument now, not of victory, but of survival, turned to memory; of hope carried too far, yet living still in the hush between waves.
Pic Desc: Marooned Ghost ship
Size. 15″(l) 13″(H) mounted on bog oak (island). Main sail is creative tactile with people’s face images.
Greg McInerney BAÂ
Bog Oak Wood Sculptor. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â County Kildare, Ireland
087/1914610 (mobile)
