Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One November-December 2024
Hussey’s Banjo, poems by Michael Durack.
Hussey’s Banjo
Two pounds per man the weight allowance
for the personal belongings of the men of Endurance
when they abandoned the ice-floe they named Camp Patience
to hazard survival on Paulet or Elephant Island.
Two exceptions to that two-pound limit:
the surgeons’ medical supplies and Hussey’s musical instrument,
a five-string zither-banjo that Shackleton deemed
“brain food” and “vital mental medicine.”
So, while The James Caird rode the monstrous waves
of the Southern Ocean seeking a lifeline in South Georgia
the men on Elephant Island formed a male-voice choir
for Saturday concerts in The Snuggery or Billabong,
and the little meteorologist with his six-tune repertoire lifted their spirits.
They say the penguins, though repulsed by his Scottish airs,
warmed to It’s A Long Way to Tipperary.
At the mercy of fate, back of beyond,
twenty-two men sheltering under two upturned boats,
the stuttering notes of Hussey’s cheerful banjo
perforating the endless Antarctic winter night.
Heading South
Some day I will head south to Antarctica,
via Punta Arenas, The Falklands, South Georgia
to rest my gaze on Mount Marston and Mount Macklin,
to view the Worsley Icefall, the Crean Glacier,
the Cheetham Ice Tongue, the Wordie Nunatak.
Some day I will round Cape Hurley and Cape Wild,
sail by Bakewell Island, McCarthy Island,
McNish Island, the Vincent Islands,
follow the contours of the Shackleton Coast
in remembrance of those scientists and stokers,
cooks, engineers, carpenters, surgeons,
artists, dog handlers, jacks-of-all-trades,
officers, seamen, survivors, The Boss.
Two Photographs
One hundred and seven years apart.
Frank Hurley, Australian, pictorial artist,
his flashlight portrait of the listing vessel,
a night spectre haunting the polar ice.
And the submersible camera’s shot
of a ship upright and substantially intact,
two miles deep on the floor of The Weddell Sea.
Below the taffrail, across the stern,
bold as brass, clear as day, the letters E N D U R A N C E.
© Michael Durack
Michael Durack lives in County Tipperary, Ireland. His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications in Ireland and abroad as well as airing on local and national radio. 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.