The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #105603 Message #2175346
Posted By: Midchuck
20-Oct-07 - 12:36 PM
Thread Name: BS: Poems that speak to you.
Subject: RE: BS: Poems that speak to you.
When I'm really upset with someone, I like to review this excerpt from Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Captains:"
Had I had guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm, I had run him up from his quarter-deck to trade with his own yard-arm; I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw, And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw; I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot in the rocking dark, I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark; I had lapped him round with cocoa husk, and drenched him with the oil, And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil; I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i' the mesh, And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws!
(But maybe that's not in the spirit of this thread...)