Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume One
November- December 2025
Stowaway And Mutineer, poems by Michael Durack.
Stowaway And Mutineer
Every great voyage requires a stowaway
and a whiff of mutiny, Endurance no exception.
Blackborow, the young Welshman failed the audition
so Bakewell, his American mate, stowed him in his locker.
Discovered by Holness and signed on as a steward.
First man to set frostbitten foot on Elephant Island.
Last man to return to England having been hospitalised
in Punta Arenas for treatment of his amputated toes.
Elevated from stowaway to Polar Medal Bronze.
”The only man I’m not dead certain of,”
so said Shackleton of McNish, shipwright and carpenter,
curmudgeon and owner of Mrs Chippy, a male cat
sacrificed with the dogs on the altar of necessity
after the ship had been abandoned to its fate.
Mutual mistrust, and mutinous mutterings.
”Everyone works well except the carpenter,”
Shackleton wrote, and yet the doomed vessel bore his handiwork
and he too braved the Southern Ocean waves
aboard The James Caird, having made it seaworthy.
Finally shipped from South Georgia back to England,
no kudos, no Elephant Island reunion, no Polar Gong.
Falling Through The Cracks
Skating on thin ice is a metaphor for danger
and camping on an ice floe carries its own risks.
Shackleton taking the night air and pondering the future
hears the warning crack and sees Holness, the stoker,
still wrapped in his sleeping bag, sink into a chasm.
Shackleton luffs him out, Holness blase,
lamenting only the fate of his sodden tobacco.
Eight years on, a fisherman out of his native Hull,
but having once fallen through the cracks and survived,
no second rescue awaits, no gripping wrist
on a trawler near the Faroes, lost at sea.
A Missing String
In Greenwich, London look out for
Leonard Hussey’s banjo bereft of a fifth string
like a frostbitten foot missing an amputated toe.
Who knows what became of it?
Did it snap like the timbers of the ice-locked ship?
Was it flung on the ice with all the jetsam
of Ocean Camp and Camp Patience?
Perhaps it reached its limit of endurance
during a Saturday concert on Elephant Island.
No likely replacement south of Punta Arenas or The Falklands,
and slim chance of Shackleton picking up a spare string
amid the whaling stations of South Georgia.
The banjo served its purpose, medicine for troubled souls.
Now in retirement, taking a well-earned rest,
an autographed curio in a maritime museum.
© Michael Durack
Michael Durack lives in Co. Tipperary, Ireland. He is the author of a memoir in prose and poems, Saved to Memory: Lost to View (2016) and three poetry collections, Where It Began (2017), Flip Sides (2020) and This Deluge of Words (2023) published by Revival Press.