And am I fain to speculate Upon the burden of your past? When I, myself, am flotsam cast Ashore a little while to wait For Time’s resistless tides that sweep In endless waves of night and day Across the shoaling milky way From some vast, unimagined deep! THE ANCIENT LOG BOOK ’Tis a time eaten volume with pages so blurred That they seem to peer out through a fog, But our fancy illumines each lustreless word Of that battered old “wind-jammer’s” log. Till our eyes gazing out through those angular lines Like windows, transparent, behold Far vistas of seas where adventure combines With “spices” and “teak wood” and “gold.” “Off the Horn” where the “greybeards” loomed up “mountain high” All “our topsails were carried away”; Then ’twas “cutlass and pike” when the “pirates drew nigh” As “becalmed off Macassar we lay.” “One man hurt” then a later notation, “he’s dead” And “was buried at sea” all we know, He “signed from Tahiti” a “good man” they said, “The fo’castle hands called him ‘Joe’” Lone wanderer far from his native lagoon Was he mourned by some garlanded maid? We ponder till jarred by a “roaring Typhoon” And “there on our beam ends we laid”. “With our water casks low” when our “Bread had give out” “We fetched by some island unknown” Though we “dragged on the coral” while “Going about” We added “their stores” to our own. There’s the wash and the surge of the murmurous deep In each billowing flourish of ink. Though the captains are silent in fathomless sleep What they tersely inscribed is a link. With a past, when our banner, its glory aflame To the winds of the heavens was flung; And their deeds are forever an epic of fame Such as Homer of old might have sung. THE DANCE OF THE MOON BEAMS O the moonbeams dance down the broad expanse Of a path o’er the heaving sea, And they blithely trip from tip to tip Of the billows ranging free. Down a highway bright of silvery light They dance to the ghostly moon, In the sprightly set of a minuet And the whirl of a rigadoon. To our lonely shore like a burnished floor Streams that river of luminous sheen; ’Tis a fairy track through the shadows black ’Tis a bridge that spans between. The regions here and that unseen sphere Far off in the western sky, Where the day is done with the setting sun And the sunsets fade and die. Where the moon holds court and her minions sport As over the seas they roam, And they dance their way through the glistening spray And laugh in the rippling foam. “O the night is ours and its witching powers “And there’s never an eye to mark, “For the demons sleep in the caverned deep “And the goblins of the dark.