Late Salutes - a poem

Hi Harry.
Loved those poems great prose. When I was in a writing group up Vernon's way, I was taught how to write Haiku, wonderful way to relax, even though my wife hated them.
THanks for posting your poems.
Des

Yes Vernon, old man plod is not what he once was.
Recall the Cape Town lads, nice as long as you behaved.

Now female police some barely 5 foot tall, beards and even the odd Turban.
Not as tough and even though now armed here as you know, frightened to use them in case some one gets hurt.

It's been all a hush on this page for a year. Time to dig around in my poetry box:
A poem I penned some years ago in memory an event in the Indian Ocean in January 1957. I was junior r/o on Brocklebank's ss Mahanada.


Lost Ship

We saw nothing on the wind-glazed surface,
nothing floating in the spume as we steamed
across her last position on the chart;
no scrap of cargo, not a boiler suit,
nor a crumb of last night’s rice.

In the dark we’d talked
in bursts of dots and dashes,
that other man and me.

We’d clung in chairs chained to the deck,
one hand on the tuning knob
chasing each other’s warbling signals
as masts swayed
and phosphor-bronze aerials swung out
wild over the troughs;
the other hand thumping a big brass key -
in the cyclone.

It was sixty years ago - she flew the flag of Pakistan,
a new country. But the ‘Minocher Cowasjee’ was old
I now discover - launched as ‘Parisiana’
by Irvine’s yard in Hartlepool, where my father -
back from his war with Kaiser Bill - might well
have hammered rivets into her, hard against
his own dad’s hammer on the other side of the plate.

Three miles down they’re rusted now, those rivets;
strewn about, forgotten, like Asian mother’s tears.
She’s just another hull - after all,
the ocean floors are flung with ships...