Upon the deck in rinsed dawn-light, where tar and salt lay sharp as brine,
The Captain’s hound would pace the planks and test the wind with lifted head;
Below, where lantern halos swam in hoops of amber, faint and fine,
The ship’s grey cat slid through the beams like smoke the night had shed.
The rigging chimed with waking gulls; the blocks knocked idly at the mast;
Warm pitch breathed out its resin-sigh; the sea lapped low against the keel;
The dog trod broad in sunlit pride, his shadow long and swiftly cast,
While green-eyed silence, whiskered, passed where coiled and patient cables wheel.
Through rib and spar and sweating hold the cat would stalk her silver prey,
Past biscuit sacks that smelt of wheat and damp with harbour mould;
She felt each tremor in the wood, each furtive scrape in hidden bay,
And struck as quick as striking flint in caverns close and cold.
Above, the hound in galley steam would nose at marrowed bone,
At onions frying, dripping fat, at crumbs in kindly rain;
He barked at scampering shapes for sport, with laughter in his tone,
And shook the echoes from the deck like sunshine after rain.
They wrangled in the noon’s hot glare when tar ran soft as ink,
And flies drew maps on drying nets beside the scupper’s lip;
The cat would blink with sovereign calm upon the water’s brink,
While he, with thudding tail, proclaimed himself the soul of ship.
But when the barometer fell like a coin in fathomless doubt,
And cloudbanks bruised the western rim with iron, slate, and green,
The first low moan along the shrouds sent every creature out
To taste the edge of coming wrath no mortal eye had seen.
The wind came in with teeth of sleet and hands of stinging spray;
It flayed the deck to whitening foam and split the night in two;
The masts bent down like penitent men forced hard to pray,
And cordage screamed a harp of storm no human fingers knew.
Within the pantry’s swinging dark, where brine and vinegar stung,
And barrels knocked like muffled drums in some besieged redoubt,
They crept between the rocking casks from which the bilge-smell hung,
While overhead the timbers groaned like oxen under drought.
The lantern’s flame blew thin and blue, a frightened, guttering star;
Flour rose in ghostly clouds that filmed the salted air;
Tin plates careered like startled moons and rang from spar to spar,
As if the ship were wracked with dreams too heavy still to bear.
The cat, whose eyes once ruled the hold with emerald, tempered fire,
Let fall her claim of claw and hiss and pressed to living heat;
The dog, whose tread had marked the deck in loyal, lone desire,
Folded his storm-soaked flank beside her, close in that retreat.
Their breathing found a common tide beneath the thunder’s roll;
Her purr, a hidden engine’s hum; his heart, a steady drum;
Two pulses answering the gale that battered plank and soul,
Till fear itself grew tired of them and left their refuge dumb.
So in that wooden cave of oak, by spice and biscuit sack,
Where pepper pricked and molasses bled a dark and sugared trace,
They fashioned not by boast or bark nor by the hunter’s knack,
But by shared warmth against the cold, a gentler kind of grace.
For salt tastes less of bitterness when mingled tear with tear,
And crust is feast enough when parted paw with paw;
Thus in the tempest’s iron reign, beneath its vault of fear,
They built a small, enduring peace no storm could overawe.
(By John Shenton)