But it is twilight in le Conquet, and the sea is rushing in so fast it gives you vertigo when you stand in the middle of the bridge with the blue wooden railings. And there are two tides in a day and that’s eight meters of rise and fall and double the vertigo, and I crash down on the bed over the whitewashed wooden floorboards, in the room with soft grey wallpaper and pastel purple paint over the accessories, and the wooden bird over the fireplace. Around the corner the old stone houses stand over the creek, looking almost exactly as they have for the past 500 years, the pockmarked stone and flowers on the staircases without railings and the painted wooden window shutters. And le Conquet grew rich with its middlemen sailors ferrying goods between Asia, the Middle East and Africa up to Britain and northwestern Europe. And when they couldn’t trade with the British they became pirates and plundered them instead.
© 2009 Pinaki
4 Comments
really cool…you are the cat’s whiskers! where was this?
Le Conquet… Wonder why a poet who definitely isn’t a seaman could have chosen this town, so imprinted by the coldest streams of the Atlantic? A personal challenge or the wrong choice? Or did the poet/explorer transfigurate into a deep black cat who just goes everywhere because she really has to? The new section in the website reflects so much, but most of all lack of color and diffused frustration from a continent which isn’t what it should have been…
The poet reads and understands Dante, and soon he must be given to write his own Divine Comedy.Somebody give him a pen, somebody give him a platform. It’s time. No time to waste.
Beaing a native of brittanny, I would like to thank you for capturing very well the spirit of this region. Your pictures transported me back home, with the small details which make this place special. The Hortensia flowers, the granite rock, the details you have captured without falling in the postcard. Thanks !
It makes me realize that for someone coming from outside the religion would seem to be everywhere.
Thanks, Thomas. Yes, to an outsider the region seems soaked in religion. And I can see why – even the weather seemed biblical. My next post will be on a little church I found there – do let me know what you think.