Ghost Ship

They said she sails forever the seas off Cape Horn:
See her and wish to God you never was born.
Laugh if you wish but there’s countless bones
And hulls been sent to the locker of Davy Jones.

‘Twas a fair wind and the seas were at rest;
Then a sudden heave and press of the water crest
Off Magellan Strait, and the storm’s fury grew,
Plunging down our craft and our crew.

As we bore away hard to the west, our ketch
Near to tatters, our topsails astretch,
Another ship massively built
Came out of the storm right at us full tilt.

No warning from the masthead or in the shroud
Just blue sparks of St Elmo’s fire as she ploughed
Towards us, with rope’s creak and flag’s snap over her deck’s teak.
No voice from deck soundless, no bosun’s pipe to speak.

Bell rings in her roll but for whom does it toll?
Cabin doors bang and slew, moonbeams slant through the hole.
The rigging sings an eerie song and waves slap her prow,
Trying to wake this sleeping scow.

But her bowsprit pierced our maindeck,
Then her mizzen cut across our quarter deck,
While her mainmast sliced through our foresail
And her rigging overwhelmed our fo’c’sle.

Water in scuppers bubbles and foams
Light in her cabins blazes for men with no homes,
Tiller fixed, wheel motionless, thru the grey haze’s dullness -
A craft crewless, homeless, hull-less.

Our ketch seemed to shudder and lose her rudder -
I thought that the spectre had wrecked her:
Storm died down immediately she slipped thru thus
And there was no sound and no damage to any of us.

In pathless depths that abound in the sound, (‘tis my belief),
On a rock or reef where you’d come to grief,
In shoals and shallows where souls become hallows,
Such an unfathomed phantom has no fellows.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Entered in Debbie Guzzi’s Contest Tell Me a Story

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