Note: The Tor (pictured) is a rocky outcrop in the East Coast Bays on the northern beaches of Auckland, New Zealand. Captain is a reference from a Walt Whitman line. It was an epithet CB would often jokingly refer to me as.
O’ friend! Son of this realm your native land and Knight of the Long Bay on the long shore - Fisher King to its isle and rock and sand where long ago we drank and gazed The Tor. In breastplate and armour in older times we’d sharpen lance and tongue as was our code - two valiant men of arms under the tall pines led their avenger down Rock Isle Road. Fifty years you lived a king's tale and fifty years keeper of the Unholy Grail. O’ Captain! My Captain! I say to you the mind is still young and the heart is true. And I echo back to that flickered light when the fires of youth burned in you and me - your joust a friendly repulse to my smite in our sometime world of fu*kwittery! Truly we are each to each older bound so stoke the fires that blaze up on the Firth - think on its mortal flame, its living sound how one day it shall perish from the Earth. Fifty years you lived a knight's tale and fifty years keeper of the Unholy Grail. O’ Captain! My Captain! I say to you the mind is still young and the heart is true. Written: June 2010 For CB on his 50th Birthday
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