04-03-2024, 06:51 AM
Brother Jonathan
What a lot of history
suffuses your old sunken hulk!
Fifteen years and half a world
from Newark birth,
fast steamer not so much
into harm’s way
as bearing it with you:
Panama, Nicragua,
then the famous runs–
San Francisco, Portland to Victoria
a name change, then changed back
(bad luck, as old salts know)
and finally your wreck
drowning hundreds within sight
of land, weighed down
by golden millions meant
to pay off Northwest tribes
not unlike those
which three years earlier
one of your passengers infected
with the smallpox
much to colonials’ advantage
in British Columbia
when half the natives died of it.
If a ship is not a living thing
with moods and fortunes,
times of virtue and of vice,
you could not prove it by
Brother Jonathan.
What a lot of history
suffuses your old sunken hulk!
Fifteen years and half a world
from Newark birth,
fast steamer not so much
into harm’s way
as bearing it with you:
Panama, Nicragua,
then the famous runs–
San Francisco, Portland to Victoria
a name change, then changed back
(bad luck, as old salts know)
and finally your wreck
drowning hundreds within sight
of land, weighed down
by golden millions meant
to pay off Northwest tribes
not unlike those
which three years earlier
one of your passengers infected
with the smallpox
much to colonials’ advantage
in British Columbia
when half the natives died of it.
If a ship is not a living thing
with moods and fortunes,
times of virtue and of vice,
you could not prove it by
Brother Jonathan.
Non-practicing atheist