What care these roarers?

La jeune Hortense ran aground in 1888, presumably during the kind of storms with which we've been pretty familiar in these last weeks. Although there were, thankfully, no reports of drownings, the ship itself died that day, laying itself to rest in the shifting sands of Mounts Bay, bedding down for the centuries of salt waved storms to lash over it, and now visible only when high winds pick the skeleton of the lost vessel clean...I like the way it isaimed straight at the Mount, as though acknowedging a destination it could bever reach...

The sea is calm today, the tide far out

The wind’s insouciance slicks the sails of yachts

That sport with tamer swells than blew

That night when walls of water roared their wrath

At fate’s frail-freighted Jeune Hortense.

The storm that ran this ship aground’s long since

Blown out, like candles lit for those who manned it;

A century’s winds have since shaped sandy shrouds

In awkward blessing, now picked clear,

Dispersed by wind’s indifferent fingers

Unveiling form’s brief coalescence, hid so long

Under sand’s soft sifted silence-

That now, sand lifted, these stranded exposed ribs

Puzzle the eye of the playful child, the Sunday stroller;

Although these seaweed wreaths anoint its boards

And cockle shells encrust its hull, and bow and stern

Are merely driftwood dressed in draggled dulse

Yet shape persists still, obstinate, as though

By this it proves a truth we’d like it to

That what survives is somehow meant,

Its early purpose still intact, unbowed,

Clean as the fresh sawn beams that now we play upon,

Straight as the spine lined up to point to sea;

Will we, when we run aground as we will

Stranded on some unknown shore

Find our purposes thus laid bare

Our ends revealed clean as these clean cut timbers?