The Livings' Wake Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Review these dead men
Down the anchor’s linking line
Thrown overboard from
Captain Father’s everyday reprisals:
Listen to them sing,
The muted sea shanties of hungry men,
Wanting women to spoon feed them
As they dredge the bottom
Of the pastel fonts.
The fish of every size swim in
And out,
Taking what they can knick
Without getting caught
In the skin which flutters
Like garments caught in briars,
Fondled by a burry wind-
In the swaying blues and greens
Is where they hold on,
The sun is a smothered instrument
Yellow fingers play across:
Everyday they are being pulled up,
Introduce to the gulls’ loud cries
And many are shed like
Loose scales under the crank man’s grind,
Yet when there is a slothful day
Lubricated by the rums of Nasseau,
Eagerly the chain grows more knobs of men,
Down below the obvious waves
They cling onto the umbilical chord
And continue to swim in
The livings’ wake.