The Crew

FROM "DUNKIRK'

THE CREW

Millenniums it took to make their stock.

Piltdown hung on the frontals of their fathers.

They had lain as sacrifices

Upon the mortuary slabs of Stonehenge.

Their souls had come to birth out of their racial myths.

The sea was their school; the storm, their friend.

Foot by foot and hand to hand

They had met the legions

On the beaches and in the surf.

Great names had been delivered unto them:

Caractacus,

Taking his toll of the invaders

In his retreat to the fens and hills;

Boadicea,

The storming of Londinium and Verulamium,

And the annihilation of the Roman ninth;

Alban, Alfred, Athelney, Edington!

And in the march of their survival

They had fought the poll-tax and burned

The manor rolls under Ball and Tyler.

They had led the riots against the Enclosures.

They had sung ballads to the rhythms of the gibbets.

The welts had been around their necks and ankles.

They had swept the Main with Hawkins and Drake.

Morgan-mouthed vocabularians,

Lovers of the beef of language,

They had carved with curse and cutlas

Castilian grandees in the Caribbean.

They had signed up with Frobisher,

Had stifled cries in the cockpits of Trafalgar.

They had emptied their veins into the Marne

Freedom to them was as the diver's lust for air

Children of oaths and madrigals,

They had shambled out of caves

To write the clauses of the Charters,

To paint the Channel mists,

To stand hushed before the Canterbury tapers.

* LA *

Out on the Channel,

Casual understatement, torn from its tunic,

Was driven back from its London haunts

To its clinical nakedness

Along the banks of the Ilissus,

As laughter went through the loins,

In front of the crew were rolling mountains of smoke

Spilling fire from their Vesuvian rims;

The swaying fringes of Borealis blue;

The crimson stabs through the curtains;

The tracers' fiery parabolas,

The falling pendants of green from the Verey lights;

The mad colors of the murals of Dunkirk.

Space, time, water, bread, sleep,

il

Above all-sleep;

Commodities beyond the purchase of the Rand.

Space-a thousand pounds per foot! Not up for sale

In the cabin suites or on the floors of the lighters.

The single Mole was crammed with human termites,

Stumbling, falling on the decks of the destroyers,

Sleeping, dying on the decks of the transports

Strung along the seaward end.

The solid black queues on the sand waited their turn

To file along the bridgehead jetties

Improvised from the army lorries,

Or waded out to swim

Or clutch at drifting gangplanks, rafts and lifebelts.

Time-Days, weeks, of the balance of life

Offered in exchange for minutes now.