‘Sally Port’ by Portsmouth poet Denise Bennett lavishly conjures the life and energy of Portsmouth harbour and seafront, and its varied maritime traditions. Highly lyrical and descriptive, the poem is also a contemplation of childhood friendship and the passage of time. ‘Skipper’s daughters’ (line 18) refers to white-topped waves.

Sally Port
(for Emily)

I remember when all our mornings
were a week long –
counting polar bears in the clouds;
white flapping seagulls fanning the air,
sun winking on water
as we looked across to Gosport,
saw the Lego flats and the ships’ masts
porcupining the sky.

I remember, I told her,
how the harbour master was playing boats.
The churn of the Gosport Ferry
the car ferry fizzling to France,
the wash whacking the hot walls,
cleaning the glinting, green ribbons
of seaweed. A small white craft
smoothing through the deep
and the red and black fisherman’s smack trawling;
and how we watched the skipper’s daughters
swimming ashore and waved to the passengers
on the Fast Cat day tripping to Ryde,
while in the dock, the HMSs,
the silent fleet, crouched like sombre monsters
along the water’s edge.

One clap of pigeons scuppers my dreams,
of her childhood.

There are many oceans between us now,
and my mornings, my mornings are shorter.
On the way home I stop to read the words –
Let there always be a way through water.

Denise Bennett was born in Festing Road Southsea and has lived locally all her life. She had her first poem accepted by her school magazine, The Hot Potato, when she attended John Pounds School, Portsea. As many people know, John Pounds was a pioneer of education for ragged children in Portsmouth. Denise has an MA in creative writing and is a widely published, prize winning poet. She was awarded the inaugural Hamish Canham Prize by the Poetry Society in 2004. Denise has three excellent collections: Planting the Snow Queen (2011) and Parachute Silk (2015) and Water Chits (2017). She has also written a sequence of poems about the loss of HMS Royal George which foundered off Spithead in 1782, with the loss of over 900 lives. In 2010 she co-edited the wonderful anthology, This Island City: Portsmouth in Poetry with Maggie Sawkins and Dale Gunthorp.

Local history often inspires Denise’s work and many of her poems are about specific areas in the city. Denise is the stanza rep for the Poetry Society the secretary of the Portsmouth Poetry Society. She has been a long time member of the Tongues and Grooves poetry and music club, and often reads her work in public. She has taught creative writing for Portsmouth College, as part of their adult education programme, for twenty eight years, and runs poetry workshops for Portsmouth City Museum and Portsmouth libraries as part of Bookfest. She continues to run poetry workshops in community settings and also facilitates two writing groups for Havant U3A. In 2014, she was involved, alongside local artist and photographer, Jacky Dillon, and other local poets, in a photography and art project, England Remembered about the First World War. This culminated in a presentation at Art Space in Brougham Road, Southsea. In 2019, as part of the Dark Side Port Side project, the digital walking trail called Sailortown she made a poetry film, Blossom Alley which can be heard here. Denise continues to find much inspiration for her poetry in the city.

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