Buccaneer
When I left school for work my love for books
left me apart from dreams an empty vessel
though sound enough to float upon the brine.
I left my youth with Yorkshiremen, hard men
and boys when they were far from home
here off antipodean shores.
We fished deep water, well off shore
for the Orange Roughy you’ve seen in books
ours were a pair of Polish vessels
in English hands, on our New Zealand brine.
Learning new ground was hard on gear and men,
softer youths went home.
Squalls drove me from home.
I learnt to leave and love the shore,
found comfort in the company of books.
English shore crew ran the vessel
their blood as cold and thin as brine,
sold short the hopes of boys and cheated men.
Mouths to feed had bound hard men,
there was no work at sea at home.
I met with managers ashore,
so qualified with what I knew from books,
we struck a deal to better pay the vessel,
A deal that changed, while we were on the brine.
We talked of strike, but by then brine
had filled the veins of those hard men,
broke and far from home,
strangers on a foreign shore,
unlike the iron men of books,
the best of us were only empty vessels.
And so I left them to their vessel,
lost in a woman who wrung the brine
from me in tears. Hard men ...
fall hard. I offered her no home,
no strange rich tale of exotic shores,
only the gasps of dying fish, and books.
No lee, in all life’s briny waste
shelters the vessel that is man’s heart,
far from the shores of home.
