Empty Lighthouses

Leaf 138 – Art Inspired

 

These three haiku can either be read independently, or as a triptych of linked verse. Loosely inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), which I first read for my English A-level. I have re-read Woolf’s masterpiece several more times over the years since. It is one of my favourite works of fiction. Although it is supposedly set in Scotland’s Isle of Skye, Woolf actually based the story’s locale on her family’s holidays at St. Ives in Cornwall. My own family also has a long tradition of holidaying in Cornwall, which is where I spent all of my summers growing up. Hence, lighthouses have long held a fascination for me. I remember feeling quite sad when, as a child, I learned that all of the lighthouses built in the more remote areas of the UK’s rugged coastline had been automated. The lonely idea of a lighthouse keeper’s job rather appealed to me. Hence the last of these poems in particular meditates on the thoughts and feelings of a retired lighthouse keeper, as I imagine them. With our man still tuning in and listening to the late night shipping forecast in his retirement; as well as the nostalgic resonances of Ronald Binge’s ‘Sailing By’ (1963), which has long been played alongside the shipping forecast at midnight each day on BBC Radio 4, before turning out his bedside lamp and going to sleep at night. Safely knowing that those powerful lights will still be sweeping their broad arms out over the seas around the British Isles from those elegant but ghostly unmanned towers.

 

 

Automated moonlight

dapples the dark sea,

beneath its white beam.

 

 

A brush of light,

sweeping across

the windowpane.

 

 

Retired lighthouse keeper

– counting the pips,

after ‘Sailing By.’

 

 

Ronald Binge - Sailing By (1963) Alan Perry/William Gardner Orchestra

 

Godrevy Lighthouse, St. Ives, Cornwall. Photograph credits: Wikimedia / Geograph

These poems were originally posted on Bluesky in response to a #blueskyrelay writing prompt (lighthouse).