Grimbeau

We are whaling, we are whaling, call me

Ishmael, the lucky bugger who found a tree

trunk drifting in lukewarm Horse Latitudes

and fashioned a canoe: sound, swift, bit crude;

but still, given the hairy circumstances,

he avoided the Fish’s necromancies.

Sat here on blustery Selsey Bill, chill

blasts of wintry Solent swoop the feral

groynes, sloppy creosoted and duned

with mounds of heave-hoed pebbles; propelled

from an ocean of discarded dying hulks,

Trainee corpses for the breakers yard: shelled.

This leviathan could not give tuppence worth

with his Moon and Sixpence and an old hair shirt.