There was sadness in his towering form
As he walked the windswept beach,
The clouds were louring overhead
And the **** cast up was deep,
He had to walk where the tide came in
On a narrow strip of sand,
And darting surges caught at his feet
With their floating contraband.

The wreck of the ancient ‘Neptune Glyph’
Embedded in drift was there,
Huddled under a looming cliff
With a trace of its last despair,
But rust had eaten its plates away
To the sound of the wheelhouse bell,
Where a Master and his daughter lay
‘Til the ship became a shell.

But now he skirted the rusting ship
And he seemed to hear her voice,
The daughter, in her personal hell,
She’d been given little choice:
‘Why did you take me out to sea
To avoid my mother’s plan,
She’d said that we would be leaving you
For you’re such a brutal man!’

Then a rumble grew in the rusting hulk
As the wind caught at the stern,
Rattling through the throat of a man
With a sound like someone burned,
‘I had to keep your mother from you
For she’s such an evil witch,
But she sewed a spell for a rising swell
And added the final stitch.’

The man on the beach could hear the roar
That rose from the rusted shell,
Of a storm that raged in the world before
And hurried them both to hell.
‘Why did you have to take the life
Of the mother that might have been?’
He cried aloud at the rusting shroud,
‘I’m left adrift in a dream!’

A voice replied in a rising scream
Then died away to a croak,
‘I raised the storm, but I didn’t mean
For my daughter dear to choke…’
The man turned back on the way he came
And left with a parting tear,
As a woman up on the headland watched
Him fade, and disappear!

David Lewis Paget