Long Seaport Poems
Long Seaport Poems. Below are the most popular long Seaport by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Seaport poems by poem length and keyword.
I’ve been harkening back to my formative years
Haunting seedy seaport bars in Keelung,
Navigating strange interventions abroad,
While adjusting my ears to an alien tongue.
On the streets of the market the game was afoot.
I bought a gold earring and a butterfly knife,
Then ran after numerous Dead Sea trolls,
The cause and effect of a nautical life.
I came up from nothing to a dozen tattoos.
Their steady ascension tracked the course of my rise.
I’ve sailed through typhoons, both real and imagined,
The toll noticed most by the sad in my eyes.
I struggled hard, then I struggled harder,
Heaving hawsers and mooring lines fast as I could.
There were flirtations with death and sordid disasters.
I learned to sort the bad days from the good.
It brings to mind the moral of that fabled children’s tale
That worried overconfidence and proved what’s fair is fair.
There wasn’t any race between a bunny and a tortoise,
But an existential duel between my patience and thin air.
Sometimes there’s no distinguishing a donkey from an ass.
Be wary of the scuttlebutt that whispers through the murk.
There’s a horrible hunger perched over my door.
I honor that ravenous vulture and feed it my body of work.
Remember all the Wise Men on their knees upon your yacht?
With orphans on their backs they’d crawled (with others that they’d brought)
Through rubble on the highway sands and residues of Lot.
They came from severed cities selling postcards of your thoughts,
Though offered for a penny piece, not even worth a jot.
They mused
“How are you feeling? What it is you want, you’ve got.
The words you scrawl on calling cards: ‘I AM – the others NOT’
Shun wisdoms of the Seven Seas: ‘Salvation can’t be bought’ –
Your fathers tried before you and your fathers came to naught.
“You started out by gelding goats and then by casting lots
Of bodies to the battlefields, contorted, tight and taut,
Then wallowed in the wake of trails the dervish devil trots.
“With marching bands of fatherlands, and drums of Hottentots,
You lure your legions in harm’s way like giant juggernauts.
Like Tweedle Dum your minions come (the sober and the sots,
The troglodytes, barbarians, and mislead patriots,
The Vandals, Huns and Hannibals and seaport Cypriots,
The Japanese, the Congolese, Americans and Scots)
To vanquish bows and arrows, spears and catapulted shots
Of those who hide in bamboo huts their families, pale, distraught,
(Their withered wives with dried up breasts, their swollen babes in cots)
Who swoon, engulfed in poison darts and vats of acid hot,
Consumed by magic mushroom clouds, atomic megawatts.
“In churches of your deities, your Holy Huguenots,
Your Imams, Rabbis, Voodoo Dolls and Mitered Lancelots
Lit wicked kindled candled walls in temples (while we fought)
(Used pins and needles, magic spells on makeshift mock whatnots)
And mosques, cathedrals, synagogues have blessed each new onslaught
With prayers for pipers, puppets, pawns, your rigid armed robots.
Continued in Part 2…
A night for Romance
Wes at on an upturned boat of the type of “the old man and the sea.”
by Ernest Hemingway used, the night had all the ingredients needed
for romance, full moon and glittering stars on blue velvet.
She gave herself to me, how trite and old fashion this sentence sound
nevertheless, it was so, sixty years ago.
I gave her a cheap wristwatch bought in Genoa it was hopelessly slow.
I think it was in some small seaport in Guatemala or some other
the port on the coast of Latin America and the year was 1964.
Then the night paled I could see my ship it was ready to set sail
to some other destination. And so many years later her kisses
still lingers on my lips.
We, the travellers
Many people when they get elderly travel the world
to see famous places and other cultures.
When they die, they will have no recollection of the travels.
I have been to every country that has a seaport,
working long hours, it was dark when I got up and dark
when the toil was over.
I might as well not have been there, because the docks
are always the same, bars, whores and booze and
they all looked the same, and the women were selling
the same wares whether black or brown, but for a man
alone it was the nearest he came to love.
When the big shadow falls on me, it will be forgotten.
I’m un-fouling my anchor chain
In this seedy seaport bar.
Bid farewell to the tavern rats
Who’ll stay rooted where they are.
Pull the cork. Tip the bottle back.
Take a long soul-warming sip.
Feel that heady brew trickle down,
Braced and cocked to board my ship.
Cobblestones on a dirty street
Glisten darkly in the rain.
Find my way to the waterfront
Down a twisting gas-lit lane.
Mooring lines, like a spider’s web,
Bind my schooner to the pier.
Cast them off with the morning tide,
Underway without a tear.
Ride the swells of the raging sea
Through Poseidon’s fickle realm.
Dream of women I’ve likewise tamed
With my hands upon the helm.
Cross the line sailing far beyond
The landsman’s narrow world.
Navigating an open course
With a pirate’s flag unfurled.
And there’s poison in my blood,
Poison thick as delta mud.
Yes, there’s poison in my blood,
But I’m alright.
I’ve looted Treasure Island
With the young John Silver.
Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of night.
Once in a memory
The boy played by the small stream running near the hospital
where his mother was a patient and time hung heavy this
afternoon in late September.
The boy picked five elongated leaves from a bush on each one
he put a pebble wanted to see if any leaf/boat survived
the voyage to where the stream went underground.
One leaf made it and should come out where the seaport is.
Once the stream had run free and rapidly crossed the green
field where elderly horses grazed, after a life of pulling
heavy carts, the lady who owned the land let the horses
be free; she had spent her youth looking after her father
who had been a Danish general, keeping his boots shining?
Habits are difficult to erase sometimes, a horse was seen
trotting in the cobbled streets lost in the past.
The stream ran to the strand where men pulled the boats
up for repair and selling fresh fish, crabs and shrimps.
As for the horses, when they were so old their teeth, gone could
not eat, the last walk was the knacker’s yard; salami and glue.
The field is now a town square where farmers sell their products
and their wives sell thick woolen long jones.
There is a statue of a famous writer he looked patrician, but mostly
he suffers the indignity of seagull droppings.
The lady who protected horses was regarded as eccentric,
but she lives on in songs and tales.
The boy saw in a café two ladies he sensed he knew; little did
he knows they were, as time rolled on- one at the time, wives.
When the boy came home, his mother was out of hospital,
boiling potatoes and frying sliced turnips.