Doldrums. The masts swing slowly as a sleeping breath
and idleness lolls in every scrap of shadow.
Below-decks is a furnace. Wetting our canvas
occupies the men but does not tempt a breeze.
A league away, Hector ripples in the heat.
Rowed of late from our sister ship, the purser
thinks a play’s the thing, and brings a quarto volume
brimming with vengeful Danes and casual slaughter,
meant for our improvement in the wind’s delay.
The notion spreads amongst us like the plague.
Since words are plentiful, none need miss out,
and with the lettered coaching those who never learned,
parts are multiplied: this Hamlet duels Laertes,
another questions skulls in the long boat’s open grave,
a third stabs a listener in the shrouds.
A sheet-clad bosun ghosts the crows-nest nightly,
while Claudius mutters Cornish soliloquies;
no gangway’s safe from courtiers conning lines
and the surgeon is Polonius to the life.
Meanwhile, the cabin boy drowns in muslin.
A dumb show on the fo’c’sle of this wooden world
minds some watchers of the Dragon’s former Master,
before the ear of the Company was poisoned
against him and he was succeeded to the post
by his First Officer, our new Captain...
Enough! Too much wit for sailors. What passes
for gossip ashore sounds like mutiny at sea.
Besides, the Trade Winds have stirr’d themselves at last.
Post script: the crew are all afire now for Macbeth,
a harmless history, the purser says...
