Drowned boy

The boy who was drowned

Blackness never seemed so unwavering
so void-like, as the sea at night.
A fishing smack with one oil lamp in the wheelhouse,
shining yellow and wan through tiny windows,
spilt just enough light to spin a moth.

Certainly this glimmer did not reach the prow,
nor the folds of rough cloth gathered there,
nor under it, the now-spectral face of the boy
stiffened by tuberculosis and the sea

The others now sat in the oppressive comfort
of the cabin, and argued in desperate voices,
about whether or not to take the "dead" boy
back to shore, or to leave him here, in the swift currents and
swallowing darkness.

The voices with their pinched clamouring
for attention, butted up against each other in the boy's dying fever,
until he was reminded of a marionette show he had seen when he was
seven,
this sing song, this rise and fall,
the sudden scream of outrage or difficulty.

In the twisted lace of his fevered mind
the boy laughed with these puppets
and cried for himself, his final flapping reason pushing him into
catatonia.

Nothing but the tuberculosis now held him,
this twelve year old smack boy,
this boy amongst the fishermen,
this ungainly ugly man-child,

now watching the others lift him,
kiss him on the cheek,
with burly whiskered lips one by one,
wrap him in the stinking cloth,

tightly binding him in,
lowering his wracked thin form,
into the unreasonable coldness,
against which he couldn't even cry for his mother.

Silently he found himself too bound, too smothered,
to shift the cloth from his eyes as he sank,
he wanted to see this death.

Curiousity still outfoxed the lungs
that emptied and filled for the final time.