Poem – THRESHER INTO GREY (By Joseph Cavera)

THRESHER INTO GREY (By Joseph Cavera)

 

I arose just as any man would this day

To see the waves of longevic age

Dance tirelessly on Earth’s stage

Crashing incessantly in a sea of gray

 

Lieutenant’s cries were enough

To wake even those residing in the sick bay

To the task of tidying bunks and say

Conditions never improve, only grow rough.

 

Drummed out to docks, calling the bluff

Of the hope I’d get to view

Listed men to run the controls, select few

who could send her beneath, presumably buff?

 

Surely this was not, the intended ‘who’,

Scratched out on the wall,

Names not of all,

In coastal Blue.

 

Reporting in to answer the call,

my mates and I, weren’t quite rapt

to try her as she may- our need to adapt

at the unsteady controls, causing the stall.

 

Immediately into the corridor, one feels trapped,

pervaded with White walls, at all sides

Nearly numerous as the tides,

After many days, preceding crews snapped.

 

on my station, a control on slides

position scanner, running through

the waves who held answers vital to

the completion of these test rides.

 

Coordinates flying across by two

Flash on the screen, appearing in red.

Skylark ship flies overhead,

Couldn’t be safer, or so we knew…

 

The lines fell low, this is what led

Our techies to discover the direction, too high

to be fixed, this ship couldn’t fly,

unless we lowered the hull, before hope fled.

 

Deeper we fell, leaving scream to rise over sigh.

She left one hope, a separate detachment up there,

to take none but two to the sacrosanct air,

My only chance, waving to the Skylark, goodbye

 

Sprinting across the flooded hull, no where else could I stare

But the isolated chamber, just a few feet at a distance

Rushing with my strength, felt aqueous resistance

Until I dove in, and jettisoned out of there…

 

Flying upward, with accelerating constance,

my sea shuttle did witness more…

those who fell beneath, unto the abyssal floor

never to rise above, assume a dismal stance.

 

All motion stopped, silencing the jetty’s roar

that had drowned out the fear…and the dismay

Of those who forever beneath the waves would lay,

just as my craft unloaded, in tears, on the shore…

 

Then I arose, just as any man would this day

To see the waves of longevic age

Dance tirelessly on Earth’s stage

Crashing eternally in a sea of Grey