The Double Suicide Of Vasa Poem by Joseph S. Josephides

Everyone boasts. I, the frigate Vasa, stopped doing so.
The King of Sweden had ordered a Dutch to build me
but he stole from the Danes a design to materialize me,
then they loaded me with guns, dolls like scarecrows,
tipplers, weights on the keel so that I have a balance,
they kept changing my design, a mast higher and higher,
I became three-story monster, Cyclop of northern waters;
with all these we might scare Denmark so to surrender.

I could not bear my mess, so at my first trip I plunged;
half an hour my body in sea and my role finished off.
My thickness is eight points, this is the mere distance
of sailors from drowning, of the crown from vacuum.

For centuries I stayed in waters, then the King pulled
me out, sent to a museum to secure tourist income.
I couldn’t stand it and decided to kill myself again,
so I invited fungi and left them to eat my whole body,
same way as wrinkles eat the cheeks of Greta Garbo.

The Nobelists in Chemistry found no solution yet,
Nobel himself in the Golden Hall became furious.
It was much ado about nothing, a hole in the water,
the ABBA sing 'Waterloo' with philosophy’s rhythm.