Through the Porthole...

      

Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842) by J.M.William Turner 

                         

Pioneering has a dark underbelly. 

We sit in its hull for days and nights,

clenching rusted nails to rivet ourselves, 

in the hope we are not whipped with limbs and ropes, 

or punctured by moulded wine barrels and untamed diseases. 

The kings men above in their damp crimson coats 

pray to prevent a rape by the Great Atlantic.

Yet it has already begun, 

the ferocious shrieks deafen the creaks of the mast and hull,

and the sun herself is being gagged with a black cloak.

Yet the cries of the dead that should sink to ocean’s floor 

whisper through the leaking holes. They are clawing up the bow now,

rattling right next to us, 

waiting to take the place of men who drown in scurvy.

Meanwhile, our macerated skin is soaking itself in 

a cocktail of sea salt, excrement, weeping wounds,

and the entrails left out of the captains evening meal.  

At least the growing tempestuous mountains that

gulp at all that cross their path,

gorging themselves on these desperate skeletons

aswell as us, the fatal foreigners…

The tempest has flattened

The cloak swept away.

Our wretched silhouettes huddle together, 

Many are heaving the bile that sits under your tongue

When you fear death.

Their shoulders stop shivering as some think that 

The ocean is ours again. 

Pioneering has a dark underbelly, 

that has been satisfied with only one ship in its pit. 

We now huddle around our only source of light—the porthole,

the glass has a fractured haze 

through which we can only see a wreck 

clashing against the rocks.

The sails are a white body bag wrapped over the corpse, 

yet the masks lies intact reaching for the teal above, 

with King George’s flag flashing above the destructor.

Regardless of the reach of the empire and the shackles of the officers

there are some things beyond colonial control. 

The honey rays brush around the raven mass that blocks the sun’s orb

stroking calm the throbbing waters, and letting our vessel breath again. 

Pioneering has a dark underbelly, 

this misty ring has given us death and life, 

our only connection to the chaos and serenity of the seas.

We thirst for more—knowledge—wealth, 

yet are halted and sometimes destroyed by the sublime.