Aoife Mannix, Poet

Aoife Mannix is a writer and poet who first visited Medway during the Fuse Festival in May 2007. Aoife was asked to record her impressions of Chatham Dockyard in a notebook. An extract from her work is shown below

Entry

The woman at the ticket gate
is surprised it's me that's going in
and not the bloke I'm with.
She reckoned when we asked for one
that I was off shopping.
As if the history of the navy is as Nelson said,
'England expects every man to do his duty'.
As if the women keeping the home fires burning
were only interested in decoration,
not the hows and whys
of all those hundreds of years of waiting.

How they stood waving at the docks
with their children,
praying to spot their sailor
come home from the sea.
Nights spent tossing through loneliness,
the salt whipping against their faces,
the roughness of patience.
Inner storms of uncertainty,
letters unanswered,
dreaded telegrams.

Yet there are no museums built
to the silences of their losses.
How they sewed their lives back together
even after love had been drowned,
hid their sacrifices
in carefully dusted black and white photographs.
Never got any medals for raising orphans,
but devoted their own private memorials
to the ghosts of heroes.
And discovered in the ticking of a clock
in an empty house late at night,
in the waves of ships that didn't come back,
what the true wreckage of courage is.