Matt Duckworth Underwater: December 2016

Throwback Thursday? Here's a poem of mine from high school that I recently (re)discovered:

THE SEA-GOD SAILING

When the wind's a howling, red-eyed scourge--
The surf beats out a dismal dirge
And the rigging hums with a dire tune--
There comes a-racing through mist and gloom
The lord of sea and surge.

The winter sky is fraught with grey,
In frozen heaps the storm clouds lay.
So fill with ale your carven mug,
In hearty gulps drink down that slug,
As he glides into the bay.

Aye, drain that mug to the king of the sea,
Before whose prow the troubled waters flee.
To Manannan, the Celtic one,
Besides whose ship the dolphins run,
For the sea's true son is he.

And like the wilful, wind-swept waters wide,
Indomitable as the turning tide,
Wild and daring as the untamed surge--
Until the oceans very verge
His sturdy sloop doth ride.

While Neptune and his kin doth sleep--
Sung in their castles buried deep,
Indolent in the languid seas,
Lolling in the warm, southern breeze--
Manannan storms the ocean's briny keep.

For Manannan Mac Lir is he,
The warrior of the northern sea.
With flaxen sail and ashen spar,
The Celtic god doth make his war
With the legions of the sea.

In anger, the wayward sea attacks,
With swell and squall and ice that tracks.
Yet closer to the wind he leads
And braces the ocean's white-maned steeds,
And slides across their lathered backs.

Though the spray to ice in air doth turn,
And iron and flesh together coldly burn,
He grips the tiller like a hearth,
Through his frozen beard shines his mirth,
And strains at stem and stern.

Through the heart of a raging northern gale,
Pelted by the sling-stones of frosty hail,
As to futile wrath turns the sea,
Manannan, making his way with glee,
Tightens his grip and trims his sail.

In a stinging salt-spray haze he's whirled,
At him the wrath of waves is hurled--
Over him they break, like soldiers on a wall,
Above him the gulls, in brazen voices call--
And with a flag, his sail unfurled, he skims across the frozen world.

He turns his prow to the midnight land of sun and sea and sky,
And sails in the gleaming snow of the ice that will not die--
Across the world's ridge, he slowly spreads his sails,
And beaches his boat on the barren backs of whales,
And gulls about him fly.

As the wind, Manannan is free.
He sails across the sullen sea,
And though the proud waters permit no track,
Mac Lir, with a cloak from a leathern sack,
Is master there, aye master, for all eternity.

--Matthew Duckworth
from Unrecognized Poems of Literary Merit
by Mrs. Covell's A-P English Class
1978-1979.

--I just found this old volume in a box in my study, recently pulled out of the garage.
Juvenilia, by any other name . . . .

May your yuletide be cheery, be bright, and be salty.
-----

Heed the reefs not yet charted
Seek that green isle beyond design

-from "Oh Malachi Malarkey"

Here's that whole poem:

OH MALACHI MALARKEY

When the ropes of reason slacken
When the veils of prudence thin
Then intuition harkens
Then souls fit skin to skin

Hope can be so brittle
Clay not fired to the core
Well-thrown bowls roughly handled
Scattered shells along the shore

Now there's a measure in the offing
Now the surges swell with pride
Say, is this canny craft a coffin?
Say, may your reach not fall too shy

Oh, Malachi Malarkey
Oh, Sophia Sophrosyne
Heed the reefs not yet charted
Seek that green isle beyond design

--MD