I saw a ship a-sailing,
A-sailing on the sea;
Her masts were of the shining gold,
Her deck of ivory;
And sails of silk, as soft as milk,
And silvern shrouds had she.
And round about her sailing
The sea was sparkling white,
The waves all clapped their hands and sang
To see so fair a sight;
They kissed her twice, they kissed her thrice,
And murmured with delight.
Then came the gallant captain
And stood upon the deck,
In velvet coat and ruffles white,
Without a spot or speck,
And diamond rings and triple strings
Of pearls about his neck.
And four and twenty sailors
Were round him bowing low,
On every jacket three times three
Gold buttons in a row,
And cutlasses down to their knees;
They made a goodly show.
And then the ship went sailing,
A-sailing o'er the sea;
She dived beneath the setting sun,
But never back came she,
For she found the lands of the golden sands,
Where the pearls and diamonds be.
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Coffee In Heaven
You'll be greeted
by a nice cup of coffee
when you get to heaven
and strains of angelic harmony.
But wouldn't you be devastated
if they only serve decaffeinated
while from the percolators of hell
your soul was assaulted
by Satan's fresh espresso smell?
-- John Agard
I was looking for another poem which despite the wonders of the world wide web escapes me, which may have more to do with my memory than the presence or absence of this poem. I will continue the hunt later, but in it found the above gem.
And finally a quote, from a death notice of one close to me
"If music be the food of love, play on." Helen kept love well fed.
Found it, Romance reminds me strongly of this poem.
The Two
When he gets off work at Packard, they meet
outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He's tired,
a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion
on his own breath, he kisses her carefully
on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather
has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.
The two gaze upward at the sky, which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.
The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided
what to become. The traffic light at Linwood
goes from red to green and the trucks start up,
so that when he says, "Would you like to eat?"
she hears a jumble of words that means nothing,
though spiced with things she cannot believe,
"wooden Jew" and "lucky meat." He's been up
late, she thinks, he's tired of the job, perhaps tired
of their morning meetings, but then he bows
from the waist and holds the door open
for her to enter the diner, and the thick
odor of bacon frying and new potatoes
greets them both, and taking heart she enters
to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke
to see if "their booth" is available.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no
second acts in America, but he knew neither
this man nor this woman and no one else
like them unless he stayed late at the office
to test his famous one-liner, "We keep you clean
in Muscatine," on the woman emptying
his wastebasket. Fitzgerald never wrote
with someone present, except for this woman
in a gray uniform whose comings and goings
went unnoticed even on those December evenings
she worked late while the snow fell silently
on the windowsills and the new fluorescent lights
blinked on and off. Get back to the two, you say.
Not who ordered poached eggs, who ordered
only toast and coffee, who shared the bacon
with the other, but what became of the two
when this poem ended, whose arms held whom,
w ho first said "I love you" and truly meant it,
and who misunderstood the words, so longed
for and yet still so unexpected, and began
suddenly to scream and curse until the waitress
asked them both to leave. The Packard plant closed
years before I left Detroit, the diner was burned
to the ground in '67, two years before my oldest son
fled to Sweden to escape the American dream.
"And the lovers?" you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.
Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,
a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume
of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices
of spent breath after eight hours of night work.
Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write?
Why the two are more real than either you or me,
why I never returned to keep them in my life,
how little I now mean to myself or anyone else,
what any of this could mean, where you found
the patience to endure these truths and conf usions?
Philip Levine
Breath
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