Shipping Season - Nov 15 2022

 

Shipping Season

Nov 15 2022

Early winter,

and I see a solitary freighter

anchored in the harbour

out past the breakwater.

It rides high

bobbing lightly on the swell,

yet to be loaded

for its final trip

with the last of the harvest this year.

The end of shipping season

and the lake is a cold black obelisk,

grey clouds

hover low.

While the hull

is a beacon of colour,

a luscious red, streaked with rust.

A flurry of snow fills the air,

wet sloppy flakes

that accumulate on land

but dissolve in the water as fast as they fall;

the vast forbidding lake

shrugging off winter

with indifferent ease.

In the deepening dark

the small windows are brightly lit,

so the workhorse ship

look almost festive against the gloom.

And with the smoke rising from its stack

I imagine a cozy fireplace

warmly ablaze

in a snug shipshape interior.

I can see it even now,

a still life

that could be a snow-globe

with its intricately rendered miniature.

But then I think of the sailors

voyaging out on the lake

into winter storms and towering waves;

the deadly cold and fickle weather,

the Edmund Fitzgerald

split down the middle

and lost at sea.

Soon, the inner harbour will turn to ice.

But Superior never freezes;

the vast forbidding lake

too powerful

for even winter to defeat.