One of my projects this summer was to keep writing poetry. I didn't get to it as much as I'd hoped, but here's one poem that I've been working on. I can't call it finished, but it's at a point where I'm going to let it alone for a while.
In the Teeth of it
(at the Mary Rose Museum, 2009)
Short of a compliant wind to
Blow their adversaries
Into combat, Tudor naval gunners
Would carve them linstocks
Some half-yard long in wood,
The dragon a favorite trope
Each beast intricately set to bite
A rope that,
Lit,
Would burn the fuse set though
The cannon’s sheath until
It caught the powder packed behind the ball.
And here are three
Raised sodden from the Solent’s silt,
The great ship that bore them sunk
In battle when,
If you believe the French,
Deckfulls of hardheld matchcords
Set a single
Splintering broadside
Devastating
Devastating
Even to its deliverers.
In what panic were
These fancy tapers set to work,
I wonder now,
Or fear, or desperate resolution, and
Decorated in what
Repose?
And in what spirit did their unsung makers
Turn to art when contemplating
Hurt?
Like the gunstock lined in pearl,
The knight’s helm extravagantly worked,
The jaunty pin-up by the bombardier’s perch
Were these fire dogs
Born of shiftless
Ostentation
Intimidation,
Idleness,
Of irony,
Or of a wish
To make a fetish
Of a murdering tool?
Or were they, perhaps, a semaphore
To all survivors of their fatal craft
That these were machines
Worked by men with
Better things to do,
Good men pressed by brutes
Makers first,
Who, in the calm before
The drowning fight
Found their best selves
And spoke a half millennium across to ours.