The Questionable Death Of Jack Po Poem by Stephen S. Yeandle

A tumultuous furious sea, mounting, breeding in shadow silhouette, came with the dawn of the night. Waves like shoals of conflating sharks feeding in frenzy on the surface rise.

On this gray and frozen storm blown day; a penetrating gloom flooded the sky and seeped from the pores of the planet like the cold sweats of disease.

The old Captain’s mind was besieged by memories, hauntings of family, by friends long ago lost and consumed by the same angry sea.

The Labrador Current was more serpent, on this what some would say, was the Captain’s last day. Lashing out with its tail, driven
before a hundred knot wind that came bellowing; commanded both sea and the land.

Shutters whipped and battered the old wooden house. Fire flames thrashed in the hearth and struggled to remain ablaze below a chimney that trumpeted like a Norsemen’s invasion, when the last church bell was heard from a village in siege.

The defiant Captain, his voice raised, growled a suitable curse at the wind and its damn familiarity. Fusion and fission exchanging places in a blink and a nod. The old house was forced to inhale, inflating like the lungs of a deep diving whale; the drawing room now a sundering scene as things commenced blowing about from a breach in the
wall where a window once was. Horizontal draperies like battle flags flew, then a weapons grade thunder preceded the crunch as a falling tree entered and claimed part of the house.

The blackest of days became the blackest of nights.

Capt Jack Po stood alone staring out from his second floor study; rapid fire clusters of energy bursts, a peculiar event to come with the snow, cracked in deafening discharges that lit up the night confirming the beach was no longer below. The first floor quarters began to flood; the foundation was shifting and soon would give in.

After seventy years as a seafaring man, the old Captain knew clearly that a dangerous and flawless assemblage was well underway. A fugitive from broad siding rogues; renegade waves ten stories high, sailing for days through 20 foot seas in rain that congealed; borne by a wind that struck like a fist, while lashed tight to his helm.

From Newfoundland down to Cape Horn, he had cheated death time and again one by one, year after year. When the court said, “all rise, ” the Captain defied. Now the ancient gods of the sea were attempting again to serve a long published warrant for his stated contempt. They wanted his life and they would have it this day. They were coming ashore seeking him out.

Standing in strobe flashes, this barrel chest man with hair like a poet long and ablaze, a beard that seemed had always been gray. A resolute image on a ghostly stage with an enigmatic smile covering his face; a snifter of brandy gripped tight in his hand; bundled in black wool from his waste to his neck.

He felt this night was likely his last.

He knew the 'storm clans' and knew them well; The Cyclones,
The Blizzards the Hurricanes, the Nor'easter band of pirates and rogues. Hellfire, Damnation, Destruction and Fear; all enforcers of the Satan’s scorn for what had been made.

The brandy continued to warm his aged wrinkled flesh and coursed through his veins like a low burning flame. The document he wore for his face, charted a life inured of death. He once again flourished in the midst of it all. Jack Po, knew storms like this came to evacuate hope and leave in its place despair before death, but it was failing yet again and would have to accept the old man with a smile on his face or it
must let him go and live with its shame.

The Captain was not a reducible man he would die as he had lived or be damned to hell. The court spoke out, that all should sit, but this old man preferred to stand. They never found his body and as far as I can relate he continues to live.