Shipwreck

Our boys loved going to Nags Head, NC to spend time on the beach. The old Ship Wreck is an interesting attraction. It would come and go in the sand depending on how many hurricanes we had that season. We always looked at this massive hull and wondered what must have happened. I decided to write this poem to give my version of the events that left it buried in the sand all these years.

Shipwreck

Old ship bones lie buried and rotten

Reflecting a story that’s long forgotten

Symbol of strength

Pride of the ocean

An ill fate soon to be gotten

Flag blowing from the high mast

White billowing sails

Long days on the wide open ocean

Casting their fates t’will soon be too late

As the sun goes to sleep without motion

Port of call on islands across the Caribbean

With many wild stories to tell

Rum and Sugar and maybe some gold

With pirates hot on their tail

Drinking sweet rum in the late evening sun

Singing songs of women with assets

Dead heads in the morning pounding their skulls

Trying to find a way to get past it

Red sky that morning gave an ominous warning

Of danger north of Hatteras

Straight into the gale without any quale

She drove as the storm came at us

If they’d been there before we don’t know for sure

They surely did not remember

Since they rode without fear on this ghost ship of death

Into the ill-fated storm of September

Gargantuan waves crashed over the bow

Drowning out the sailors’ last cry

Cargo and ship sank into the dip

As the cane of September swept by

Pounded and broken the ship in a swoon

Without sailor or cargo or sail

Everything had been cast the ship heaved its last

To lie in its grave in the dunes

For the next hundred years entombed in the sand

It took its rest without moving

Until a cane of October

Came washing over

Leaving open its coffin for viewing

Now families with children climb high on the dunes

Assuming but never knowing

Ships’ bones tell no tales

That’s left to me

And my imagination’s still growing

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Photo and painting by Dwight L. Roth

Photo of old shipwreck near Nags Head, NC