APOSTROPHE TO MONS CALPE

1 Mons Calpe! Give me strength to tell your charms,Who guard the blue Atlantic’s flowing gatesWith stony steeps, which many men-at-arms – While standing watch o’er these strategic Straits –Have augmented with fortresses of stoneWhose silent guns still train on the surrounding zone.

2 Like a beheaded sphinx, all limbs and trunk,Your limestone body, outstretched in the sun,Is circled by the wrecks of warships sunkAnd other vestiges of battles won:The wounds of siege-work show on both your flanks,Upon your tow’ring breast, your haunches and your shanks.

3 You saw the birth of continents and seasAnd once held Afric’s shore beneath your paws,Until corrosive time, by slow degrees – A more destructive force than human wars –Outprised it from your grasp: you watched it slipAway through centuries like the sails of a great ship.

4 All seasons find you in your living copeOf green maquis: wild olives and stone pinesAnd shrubby underbrush. On every slope – Partitioned by old walls in zigzag lines –The rents and gashes in your ragged smockShow, amidst the green, patches of naked rock.

5 An island in the oceans of soft air,A site of refuge for migrating flocksWhose resting pinions, as they shelter thereGrace branching trees, or clefts between the rocks:You are a landmark in their passing flight:A refuge for the birds and birdwatcher’s delight.

6 Your creviced steeps support a colonyOf noisome seagulls with white-feathered breasts,Which wheel and swoop above the sparkling seaAnd guard with jealous care their hidden nests:They fill the sky with flecks of grey and whiteAs they surround your cliffs in their encircling flight.

7 Elsewhere, a tribe of Barbary MacaquesSit preening one another’s tawny furOr brooding with the sun upon their backsOn man-made walls, a seat which they preferTo tree-branch or misshapen rocky mound,So by your forts and roadsides they are often found.

8 You stand beside a tranquil azure Bay – Girt round with gently-rolling Spanish hills – Within its waters, dolphins sleek and greyCrest with the rippling waves, and bob their billsOut through the foaming brine, squealing with glee,As they swim onward through the sunlight-spangled sea.

9 The scattered caves which overlook the Straits,Along the ridges of your southern side,Formed by the seeping rain which permeatesThe porous rock, were suited to provideTo ancient hominids a sheltered homeWhose nightly fires brightened up th’interior gloam.

10 The crown of all your caverns is the oneNamed for St Michael: not a work of man’s,Its stones seem like an ocean-forest, bornIn some primeval age: sponges and fansClumped up in columns, turned to lifeless stone,Itself a sediment of sea creatures’ shell and bone.

11 There is a stair between the sea and sky,Which Spring will beautify with wild flowers.It cuts a path through palm fronds and cactiAnd passes by a myriad rock-hewn bowers:Called by ‘Med Steps’, it seems a Paradise,With flowers in fresh bloom, and twirling butterflies.

12 Across the Straits, cloud-footed Atlas stands –The coastal wall of its long mountain range – Reminding us that there are other landsBeyond Europa, different and strangeIn customs, creeds and costume: though there wasA time when we were theirs, o’ercome in conquest-wars.

13 Beyond the Herculean Pillars liesThe vast Atlantic, with great tempests tossedWhich made the bark of Ulysses capsizeSo that the captain and his crew were lost:You marked the ‘Non Plus Ultra’ of the worldUntil Castilian seamen its wide expanse unfurled.

14 Men claimed you for a work of Hercules:Then Tarik ibn-Ziyad gave his nameTo your mountainous mass. Castle and keysWere Isabel’s bequest when you becameA part of Catholic Spain: this is the flagStill to be seen on poles about your topmost crag.

15 Britannia, in Empire’s fleeting day,Made you a new addition to her portsAnd her ensign, the Union Jack, todayStill wags on public buildings and old forts;And yet, your shores no longer seem to teemWith sailors borne by British ship and submarine.

16 Mons Calpe, your primeval fortress sitsBetween two continents, astride two seas:Not Moors or Romans, Spaniards or Brits,Can claim you for as long as they would pleaseFor you are never theirs, you are your own:With secret memories enclosed in every stone.

NOTES:

An ‘Apostrophe’ is a literary form of direct address to a person or personified quality or inanimate object, usually absent or otherwise unable to respond. The form of the poem is the English sestet, with rhyme scheme ABABCC, and it is written in iambic pentameter (ten syllables per line) with a hexameter (twelve syllables) for the final line of each stanza.

Stanza 2: The felicitous image of the Rock of Gibraltar as ‘a beheaded sphinx’, with its triple suggestion of monument, mythic guardian and unusual shape, is borrowed from Paul Theroux, ‘The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean’ (1995), pp. 8-9.

Stanza 13: The version of the Ulysses (= Odysseus) legend alluded to is not one which appears in our extant Greek sources, but that utilised in the

Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (Inferno, Canto XXVI). According to Renaissance tradition, the Pillars of Hercules bore the inscription ‘Non Plus Ultra’ meaning ‘Beyond Here [there is] No More’.