Apprenticeship
Dusk on the water, the job was to watch,
unracked, the wet still-dripping creels being tipped
into the grading tray, alive with life.
Our seas provided black-eyed velvet crabs
with small horns ridging their top plates. The work:
to grade by size, Those big as a fist, they pointed -
big as a heart, I saw - were lifted out
as worth a better price. Hours, you would weigh
by hand and eye and a slow part of the mind,
young jeweller at a tray of breathing stones;
arbiter at the filling, refilling box.
The night progressing until the shed light
drew out thick moths. To work was to find yourself
drawn in - or was it drawn back - to something
careful and mysterious, hard-shelled and resistant.
Big as a fist or heart. The same rain falls
on that shed and on this house. I did it five years,
and then did it for the rest of my life.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2023. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor for 2023 was Aoife Lyall.
Editor’s Comments:
The best poems are the ones you feel every time you read them. And every time I read this poem, I feel a slowing: a slowing of time, of breath, of thoughts. Every line a part of Campbell’s poetic net, drawing the reader ever closer to that singular, primal desire to immerse ourselves in acts of survival; to connect with an intransient part of ourselves all the technology in the world cannot replace. Though beautiful on the page, this is also a poem to be read aloud- Campbell is a master of soundscape, and the rhythm of the poem, like the rhythm of the work, stays with the reader long after the poems final full stop.
Author’s Comments:
First love marks all later loves, and in just the same way I think that a person’s first job must leave some impact on them. My own, growing up on South Uist, was to be a ‘crab-sorter’ at the weekly fisherman’s market. This poem is about remembering this employment. Mythologising it, in a way. And is about teasing out how the work of crafting poetry might be a distant relation to this act.
