The Wake Poem by David Lewis Paget

We'd been at sea on a cruise ship,
Some days to Paradise,
An island in the pacific
Of beaches, trees and spice,
But storms, they were foregathering
Not just for the ship at sea,
For frost with us was travelling
Inside Caitlin and me.

With eyes averted we rarely spoke
There were demons in my head,
For she would flutter about at night
Not join me in our bed.
The ship ploughed on through a restless sea,
While the clouds outside were grey,
And I began to regret that we
Had chosen this holiday.

I woke each morning before the dawn
And not a word was said,
For Caitlin lay, facing away
On the far side of our bed.
I'd roam around in the early hours
The silent, deserted ship,
But a life aboard alone, it sours
By the fifth day of a trip.

The clouds grew dark, enveloped the ship
And mist lay deep on the decks,
While down beneath the fathomless sea
Lay a thousand sunken wrecks.
A thousand wrecks of hopes and dreams
That started away like this,
Lost forever beneath the sea
At the lack of a touch, or kiss.

We sailed, we sailed, by God we sailed
With our heartsick contraband,
For days we sailed as the storm winds railed
But we caught no sight of land,
We caught no sight of the what-we-were
Before, when our world was new,
For love was blind in the mist and wind
That sailed with the cruise ship too.

Surely there was a meeting point
Between the land and the sea,
But the ship sailed on with our tempers gone,
We sailed in misery,
A day beyond our arrival point
The Captain came to say,
‘The land has gone, there's something wrong
We were due there yesterday.'

Wherever we looked about to see
The sea was all we saw,
I'd turn and spin, keep my hopes within,
All hope had flown before.
We cruise around in an endless sea
With never a sight of land,
And nothing is left of what was ‘we'
It's buried in sea and sand.

Buried alive in the sea and sand
With a frost that shatters the eye,
Gone with the hope of sighting land
Between the sea and the sky.
We're drifting now, for we're out of fuel
In a world of liquid pride,
With she content at the prow of the ship
And I with the wake that died.

7 February 2015