Keith D Trestrail Poet Lyric

Notes About The Poem

It was on board this ship nearly 50 years ago that me and my family left Trinidad bound for New Zealand - I was nearly 8 years old. Built in the same shipyard as the Titanic in 1954, the SS Southern Cross had a far more fortuitous career transporting immigrants and pleasure seekers across the British Empire until her sad and final resting place in Chittagong, Bangladesh (pictured) where she ended her 50 years of service as the Ocean Breeze in a ship-breaking graveyard in 2004. She was the first passenger liner to be launched by a reigning monarch. Not a big ship by today's standards but as a boy to me she was huge - I thought she was magnificent. Still do.

Listen to poem:

SS Southern Cross - the Old Lady of the Sea

   Built in a Belfast shipyard
 for Shaw Savill ‘n Albion Line.
   On her flagstaff wind ‘n lee
 flew the Southern Cross ensign,
   down a slipway to the sea
 launched afar by Her Majesty

   Behold her pale eau de nil
 green ‘n painted hull of grey,
   at twenty knots her rate
 twenty thousand tons aweigh.
   On the seas a ship of fate
 the world to circumnavigate

   Yon the Empire far ‘n wide
 from Southampton to Trinidad.
   Where from ship to shore
 off I waved goodbye as a lad,
   till in the distance I saw
 my home to be nevermore

   Smoke from her aft funnel
 into a big Caribbean sky blew,
   then set a course westerly
 by merchant captain ‘n crew.
   And to each port ‘n quay
 across the ocean carried me

   I remember gazing in awe
 up ‘n down her length ‘n beam,
   at the mighty waves below
 and how sea ‘n ship did gleam.
   In canal gates under tow
 winding our way lazy ‘n slow

   Crossing the equator I saw
 Davy Jones ‘n King Neptune
   rising up out of the deep
‘neath a high December moon.
   Till in safe passage ‘n keep
 back to the depths they leap

   Out on Oceania as a boy
 in the lido deck pool I did dive.
   The Southern Cross ‘n me
 would our long voyage arrive,
   on in all her hope ‘n glory
 the grand old lady of the sea

   On final Far East voyage
 would alas be her swan song,
   beached on a tidal seaway
 sold ‘n scrapped in Chittagong.
   A line flagship in her day
 stripped bare where she lay


       Written: May 2017

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Paul Bell October 13, 2023 at 8:30 AM Ships do hold special moments for people, and staff alike. I suppose nothing lasts forever. It would be more fitting to rest at the bottom of the sea, but like humans, the scrapyard is always beckoning.