"Leave me, Damn You Leave Me"

(a lyric for the U.S.S. Monitor, wreckage discovered 1973. In a massive salvage operation, the turret was raised August 6, 2002. Inside the turret was found the skeleton of a sailor pinned in place by a piece of light artillery, probably broken loose during the ship's final turbulent hours. The salvage-firm intends to identify and rebury the remains ashore).

Anybody can do anything they like with the lyric, except claim credit for it -- against that remote eventuality, I've sent a copy to a lawyer-friend. But otherwise, let it be anonymous.

(chorus)
Leave me, damn you leave me
To the cold grey sea
Below the winds, where nothing but the fishes trouble me
I've done my best, now let me rest
Asleep beneath the sea.

Eighth of March in sixty-two
Up Hampton Roads she steamed
A scuttled federal ship they'd raised
A black-iron fever-dream:

Riding low in the water
Shot after shot she spent
And wrecked the frigate Congress
Whose fifty guns didn't make a dent.

Merrimac had more guns, steam, plate,
We were a cheesebox on a raft
But we had eleven-inch smoothbores
And them guns swung fore and aft.

(chorus)

Our turret took a rebel shell
And Cap'n Worden was blinded
The helmsman got the medal of honor
Because he never-minded.

Aw hell, why tell? You know the rest;
It's written up in your books.
We both of us gave as good as we got
And didn't lose nothing but our looks.

That, we knew was the end of wood
The time for iron had come.
If we didn't cheer as you thought we ought
I'll beg your pardon, son.

(chorus)

It's iron yet, but we were lost
The coming New Year's Eve.
We were sent to, well -- they wouldn't tell us --
When the sea began to heave.

We were steaming south, off Hatteras
Our very own Cape Horn
When the turret-packing came away
And we knew she'd never see the morn.

The pumps did what they could
And we helped with scoop and bucket
But when the water reached the fire
Well, Chief Engineer Watters had an ignorant but forceful expression for that particular contingency.

(chorus)

Rhode Island tried to help us,
Our hauser fouled their wheel.
We overloaded every launch
But sixteen still clung to the steel.

Commander Bankhead begged those left
To leap, and take a chance--
Survive the sea, to fight again?
No thanks -- we've done that dance.

Oh I've been here, hundred-forty years
With a cannon in my lap
Your wars and worries roll over my head
And I never thought of coming back.

Twenty-foot round, eight-ply plate,
I turned coral in this turret
Where the sea-fern grows and the sand-tide flows
And your ideas never stir it.

Leave me, damn you leave me
In my cold and gritty bed
If I've deserved a thing, it's to be done and to be dead.
I died for your stories, find your own glories!
Leave me, damn you, leave me
To the all-forgiving, all-forgetting sea.