a ship of dreams

The ship of dreams
I have never been to Sylhet, Bangladesh it doesn’t matter
it was in May, the rain was relentless, and the last Bengal tigers
had drowned in a flood plain and a famous man had been
buried in a led coffin in the Bay of Bengal.
I had been stuck for a week on an elderly bulk ship while
waiting for scrap iron to fill the hulls, the sad rests of once
proud ship the oceans to be cut to pieces with disregard
of the inanimate that had histories untold.
The grisly irony for the elderly ship, it was her last voyage
she had to return to the same noisy, shitty little town
to become scrap iron and nobody gave this great indignity
not a second thought, humanity gave a fuck
On the voyage to Australia, she sank deeper into the sea
then usual otherwise, she ploughed at on at a reduced speed
she was sinking slowly like an aged man in the shallow
end in a swimming pool.
When the sea washed over her decks, authorities were called
and the crew manned the lifeboats, but she didn’t go down
right away, she lingered under the sea’s surface for days
when the navy came to rescue the crew, she had sunk more.
Having absorbed, over the years, the wishes and hopes of many
She became animate and could sense her surroundings and sense
hurts, the heartache of a crew member whose wife left him
The navy simply torpedoed the ship as a danger to shipping.