The Dream Fish Poem by David Lewis Paget

They say that I came up screaming when
I surfaced, near the boat,
Distraught, they said, eyes gleaming
Thrashing around, could barely float,
They pulled me in with a boat hook, thought
I might be down with the bends,
Then decompressed in a chamber, that
Was where this story ends.

The start was out on a dive boat near
The Isle of Tora Lee,
One of a cluster of smaller isles
Down in the southern sea,
It lay out wide on the outer edge
Of the continental shelf,
‘It’s one of the greatest dives, ’ they said,
‘But check it out for yourself.’

It fell away on the eastern side
A thousand fathoms or more,
Nobody knew how deep it was -
And who was keeping score?
The first three did their shallow dives,
No more than 100 feet,
While I stayed back in the boat to wait,
I had to be more discreet.

The record dive was a thousand feet
With our scuba type of gear,
I knew they wouldn’t be happy if
I tried the record here,
I cooked a fish on the after deck
While the rest were down below,
And ate it while I was waiting there
For their heads to finally show.

I checked the depth as I went on down
At a slow and measured pace,
I had to adjust to the pressure as
The fish swam past my face,
I checked the gauge,600 feet
And I kept on going down,
Til I came to the inlet of a cave
That brought me up with a frown.

For jammed in the entrance to the cave
The remains of a sailing ship,
Just the prow and the forward deck
With the mast collapsed on it,
The stern had broken away and gone
To the seabed down below,
But up at the front, the ‘Black Revenge’
Was painted along the prow.

I swam on into the cave, and lit
My way in through the dark,
Hoping to hell I wouldn’t swim
In the path of a roving shark,
But fifty metres inside the cave
Was a tiny glow of light,
Flickering up above me like
The stars on a pitch black night.

Then suddenly I had surfaced,
There was air inside the cave,
Pulled myself on the ledge and found
I stood by an open grave,
A line of skeletons in a row
That had once been fifteen men,
They must have known they would never roam
Or take to the seas again.

I sensed in the corner of my eye
A movement in the dark,
Then spun around and I saw her there
A woman, standing, stark,
She wore the rag of a printed dress
And she crossed herself, and hissed,
‘Would the good Lord please preserve me!
Be you man, or be you fish? ’

I must have looked quite a sight to her
In my rubber scuba gear,
I took off my mask to calm her down
As she backed away in fear,
‘How long have you lived down in this cave,
And how did you arrive? ’
‘I eat of the good Lord’s fish down here
And they’ve helped me to survive.’

She said she’d come on the ‘Black Revenge’
As the moll of Captain Tull,
He’d kidnapped her from the ‘Bell and Bar’
And had locked her in the hull,
She’d sailed the seven seas with him
Til the storm that set her free,
Swept her into this cave with him
In seventeen sixty-three.

‘His bones lie there at the head of the line,
I cut his scurvy throat,
Just as he crawled up on the ledge
When he said he couldn’t float.
My name is Mary Parkinson
And I’ve hoped, and dreamed and cried.
To see my own dear home again,
Before my mother died.’

I didn’t tell her the year it was
It would be too cruel to say,
Two hundred and fifty years had gone
But to her, a year and a day,
I told her I’d fetch some scuba gear
And I’d be back down, and soon,
And that was the day I lost my way
On that autumn afternoon.

They said I shouldn’t have eaten it,
That fish with the broad green stripe,
The fish had made me hallucinate,
I said that it wasn’t right!
‘I’ve seen the woman, deep in the cave, ’
They patted my hand, and that,
But I’m fretting that Mary Parkinson
Still waits for me to come back.

5 November 2013