Windjammers

They came landwards year after year,

torn and battered

by the bitter tides of the Horn,

the Atlantic's salt war of weather,

their brine-bleached sails

clouding vast

above decks scoured to the sea's demand:

windjammers:

They jewel imagination with beauty,

Shadow the cold voyages of our time

and make legend the broken days,

the harsh hours,

the suffering of the great days of sail.

We saw the last of them make landfall

through the mists -

the drifting dream

made of our youth and childhood -

to remain then like broken birds

locked in the dead cage of the docks,

or weathering away in the vast

esturial calm of quiet harbours

to a shabby memory of beauty

They came landwards

year after year, their crews warped

in that slow siege of time,

till the long centuries of sail died

in the driven steel of the new decades.

Windjammers:

they haunt us with knowledge

and memory of what we might have known -

the masthead sweep of stars,

and the slow march of the capstan

wheeling into history.