Memoirs In Verse

This relatively long free verse poem is based on my autobiographical short story ‘Mayday’. It describes the events surrounding a ship with a timber cargo on one October night in the English Channel. For artistic reasons some details have been changed or omitted from the poem.  Any resemblance to any events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Listen to: The Bothnia Star Part 1 - A Warning The letter and photos lay on my desk, sent from Archangelsk in Russia, by a frightened, but courageous young seaman with no one to turn to for help. The pictures were of two of our ships loaded at Baltic Sea ports, full and deep-laden with packs of sawn timber bound for the African coast. The sunlit waters of the western Med glittered and lapped at their main decks as they anchored after ten days at sea; then, I saw why he was pleading with me. Both ships were laden too deep in the water; their captains had risked their lives and those of their crews —for a bribe. They were but two of thr

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!’