Memoirs In Verse

Listen to:  The Monsoon Break On An Oil Field Our ship’s alone—for many weeks we’ve toiled,  Nurturing those rigs and platforms like flowers, Their roots searching within the Earth for oil, Reaching for that dark ichor of ancient life.   Throughout the days of May, the monsoon gathered,  And compelled Fair Weather to yield her claim, And leave us among the lonely platforms, clustered,    As a flock around their shepherd, watchful but alone. Stiffening breezes proclaimed the summer’s tumult,  And the cumulus obeyed the season’s call to fly   Eastward to the warm monsoon’s embrace, beneath the blue-mantled ocean’s sky. Now, helicopters drone on their final flights like bees,  That dip among the blooms shimmering in the heat, The rhythm of their wings beating in the breeze, To carry home their drowsy weight, replete. A host of nimbus crowds the darkening skies, And rain spills from that brooding refuge In silvered cascades—for millions the joyful reprise  Of each summer’s gift, that life-

Listen to: Killing the Cook A rage of hideous screaming stirs and hastens me below, The cook babbles, pleading in a banshee’s cry of dread, A hair’s breadth line of blood beneath his fleshy jaw does show, The heedless, hell-bent riot of sailors soon will have him dead. ‘Drop the butcher’s cleaver before you harm him more!’ The cook’s bloodied neck now caused me great alarm, ‘He steals our food, I’ll carve him into meat and bone!’ ‘Is it true, Cook? Speak man, before you come to harm!’ ‘Tonight, the crew have prawns, and all men eat the same!’ The cook now starts to argue, which the sailor’s cleaver quells, ‘He’s a damned and cursed liar! You might have the prawns, This thieving bastard cook feeds us the heads and shells!’