Four days from Grimsby’s soot-stained quay, where gulls give voice to smokeless skies,
We danced atop the green-backed beasts, our keel tossed high where reason dies.
The gallant girl, with decks a-slick, would groan and roll, then rise again,
Each corkscrew lurch a seaman’s prayer, each crest a hymn, each trough pure bane.
With scuppers weeping foamy tears and bows that stabbed the boiling swell,
Our engines hummed a weakening hymn, the batteries now a ticking knell,
While Albion’s lords, on sunlit lawns, dreamt policy safe in Downing’s shell.
The seas astern grew lecherous, with winking eyes and lips of green,
Each wave a monstrous, leaping jest, intent to drown all hands unseen.
The radar blinked, the AIS sang, a lifeline 'midst the tempest’s moan,
Yet sunlight fled our pleading eyes, and solar stayed a lie well-known.
Cook cursed and pitched his corn-dog rolls, tea sloshed like bilge from battered tin,
As gravity played saboteur, and soup took flight in drunken spin,
The gale, a mad conductor’s hand, drew out a shriek from violin.
Down to sixty, then to forty, power draining like a wound,
Each compass spin, each radio hiss, a sailor’s fate by storm festooned.
No diesel growl, no faithful churn, no throb beneath the heaving boards,
Just silence in the engine-room, and prayers not fit for parish lords.
The captain kept his vigil tight, his knuckles pale on rusted steel,
While every man clung to the rails, with death too close and breath too real,
And still, the green tide thundered on, uncaring whom it came to steal.
No light above, no hope below, the darkest day met dawn’s cruel face,
As breakers high as chapel roofs bore down with indiscriminate grace.
The cook had lost his taste for jokes, his galley now a floating tomb,
Where plates lay broken on the floor, and stew lent ballast to the gloom.
At twenty percent, the meter blinked, a traitor with no grace to lie,
While every heart aboard that ship prepared in silence still to die,
For net zero cared not at all who perished 'neath a sunless sky.
Then came a lull, not calm but less, a bastard child of storm and squall,
The wind, though filthy, now had tone, not just the madness of the maul.
The captain scanned the murky east for glimpse of sun, of warmth, of gold,
And engineer with aching limbs prayed volts from skies still pale and cold.
Ten percent, a death knell rung by men who’ve never smelt the brine,
Their dinners wrapped in plastic film, their cod from ports on Asia’s spine,
While we, the sons of whaling decks, are tossed for dreams they say are fine.
The mandate said, “Let fossil sleep; the tide shall turn by wind and ray,”
But Neptune does not sign decrees nor give a damn what lords might say.
No oar, no sail, no solar cell can fight the storm when night is long,
And death is just a silence deep that hums beneath the siren’s song.
We fish for Albion’s common plate, for housewives' meals, for suppers cold,
But policy has cast us out for virtue bought and visions sold,
While diesel roars in foreign fleets, and ours go down for being bold.
This is no tale of weather’s wrath, nor tribute to the ocean’s might,
But elegy for men undone by fools who claim to serve the light.
Let every man who’s manned a beam, and every lad who’s hauled a line,
Remember this: the greatest threat comes not from wave, nor cloud, nor brine,
But from the hand that signs the law, with little care for blood or bread,
That dooms the fleet to quiet deaths while foreign nets are brightly fed.
So curse the storm, but curse far more the silence where our engine bled.
(By John Shenton)