A time away, made now, forever (Gitche Gumee)
Posted: Tue May 12, 2015 4:07 pm
"Does anyone know where the love of God goes /
when the waves turn the minutes to hours?"
~Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"
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We rode by the rail
as the ship bore the swell,
and our hands gripped angry, like vices.
No city folk know
of the trials down below,
and dressed in sweat, in the hulls, such suffices.
She stayed straight her keel,
and was sweet on her wheel,
as we raised our hands up with much vigor.
And she climbed and she scaled,
on each wave that was felled,
as we worked with all backs bent in hard rigor.
She slipped from her moor,
with her prophecy in store,
and her sights set on making good headway.
But the winds and the waves
lean the way that fate paves,
and oft leaves one in prayer, without much to say.
If you don't believe in God,
well, you still give Him a nod,
though the devil might watch you go under.
And so came to pass,
when Gitche Gumee, with sass,
came to claim their proud ship, torn asunder.
The poor souls of the doomed,
on whom she vented and fumed,
made to lose their lives in less than a moment.
And how chapel bells rung
while the distraught families clung,
and the doomed, at her bottom, lay dormant.
She was valiant and true,
and was staid in her blue,
yet she bore her fate much as another.
And on that long, listing line,
of cold, salty-grimed brine,
claimed my tears, as I lost more than one brother.
And she swift rode the swell,
and so fated, she fell,
with sons and daughters left now to wonder
on thoughts of just what might have been
had the hulls not caved in,
and taken their fathers down under.
Such times come about,
with a shivering shout,
as Superior lets loose her danger.
But still remember, we,
of those who fought valiantly,
yet these times, in our loss, feel no less stranger.