Poems
THE QUAKER GRAVEYARD IN NANTUCKET
For Warren Winslow, dead at sea
Let man have dominion over the fish es of the sea and the fowls of
the air and the beasts and the whole earth, and every creeping
creature that moveth upon the earth.
I
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,–
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling, muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodle.."S, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Ot cabin-windows on a stranded hulk,
Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,
Where the heel-head dogfish barks its nose
On the dismembered Pequod. The man's name
Is scribbled with red chalk.
Sailors, we pitch this portent at the sea
Where Atlantean dreadnaughts shall confess
Its hell-bent deity,
When we are powerless
To buttress this Atlantic bulwark, faced
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste
In his steel-scales. Ask for no Orphean lute
To strum life back. The guns of the steeled fleet
Recoil and then repeat
The last salute.
