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| Vintage Poster for the White Star Line |
Leviathans Dreaming
James Hart
Titanic, Lusitania, Bismarck,
the whales of empire
sleep the dreaming deep
where currents sweep so slow
nothing seems to move inside
time’s corrosive crusted skin.
What hulks of history we hold
our sleeping wreckage in,
Hindenburgs consumed to flashing ash,
periscope earth barely submerged among
the White Star Line’s vanishing shipwrecks,
flotsam drifting abandoned names.
Washing up on forgotten shores
of the universe, ghostly ribs and vertebrae
dream the shapes of whales, white pyres
of memories burning familiar as zeppelins
aglare in the flares of sand
where time spouts out its empty sea.
James Hart
Titanic, Lusitania, Bismarck,
the whales of empire
sleep the dreaming deep
where currents sweep so slow
nothing seems to move inside
time’s corrosive crusted skin.
What hulks of history we hold
our sleeping wreckage in,
Hindenburgs consumed to flashing ash,
periscope earth barely submerged among
the White Star Line’s vanishing shipwrecks,
flotsam drifting abandoned names.
Washing up on forgotten shores
of the universe, ghostly ribs and vertebrae
dream the shapes of whales, white pyres
of memories burning familiar as zeppelins
aglare in the flares of sand
where time spouts out its empty sea.
December 13, 2001
(Poem from a
sequence entitled
Wreckage from the Whaling Age)
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