Here in Davy's Ocean Locker

Here in Davy’s ocean locker sleep the pale-bleached bones

Of the fallen crew of the HMS Gallagher,

Bound for the West Indies, 250 years ago.

250 years a-lying at the bottom of a clear blue ocean.

A scattered thigh bone,

Of the far too young Midshipman Gilzean from Carlisle;

A bony-home for generations of blazing clown fish.

Off-spring who carry in their fishy genes, the fable;

Of His holiness the Giant Clown fish who bestowed,

This 2 ft palatial trophy.

Soft currents caress the Admiral’s full dress uniform,

Until stitch by torturous stitch, and the occasional bit-torn rip;

Desiccated,

 To fine water-dust plankton.

Admiral Collin’s head, severed by grape-shot,

Was carried miles underneath, by a hurrying shoal of silver-winged fish,

So the story goes, a Tiger shark swallowed it whole.

A pewter mug balances on an outstretched coral hand, glinting from the centuries’ drag,

Pearl-light shines a beacon flash, a forever wink, oceans deep.

Paul Barber and Fitzwater Barley, skeletons entwined,

Beneath the now not so massive, main mast; ocean shrunk.

Who when alive, fair hated the sight of each other, now like tortured lovers,

In some Homeric mythic farce,

Supine, for the mythic God’s pleasure.

This clear deep blue,

Atop white, white sand seems so harm less.

But age and time, this remorseless life and death, faces its watery pitiless stare,

And the ocean eats and eats at Sailors’ corpses,

Because they are there.