Helmsman William Lee Poem by Isabel Szurlej

Once a lone ship was shattered off a ghost isle;
her helmsman, William Lee, did not truly drown,
yet he returned neither dead nor living.
For years he wandered, caught between the worlds,
condemned to steer beneath an endless gale.
Some stubborn curse preserved his mortal flesh,
while his soul grinned, nothing but a skeleton.

No mind remembers how he came aboard
the brigantine we called Ocean Pearl.
Lee swore he was an old, seasoned seaman,
though none of us had ever heard his name.
His hand upon the wheel was deft and sure;
he read the sun and the horizon line,
and traced our course on salt-stained, faded charts.

This human shell, whatever man he was,
sailed east to west with both his eyes held shut,
never once trusting in ded—reckoning.
Still steering north to south proved hard a task,
instruments failed to fix our whereabouts,
no mate yet breathing could find longitude.

Only immortals know no fear on angry seas.
When tempests rise, the winds will tear your sails
to shreds and hurl you into the towering surge.
Here, between the Devil and the deep sea,
death waits; in the end it always claims its share.

You may beg for mercy,
but the ocean stays proudly pitiless.

William Lee knew when the storms were coming,
could gauge their fury and how long they'd last.
He set the vessel's weathered bow to meet
the oncoming waves as we lashed lines fast
around our waists with rough spray-bitten rope.
Tons of black water crashed over the prow,
yet the helmsman kept the crew all alive.

A dreadful wonder seized us in one breath,
the way he drove through every darkened squall.
Each sailor bore the chill of his secret realm,
then no word slipped from our tightened lips.





The spelling "ded—reckoning" is intentional and follows an alternative source.