Adventurers & Tinkerers

Adventurers and Tinkerers

Chorus

Adventurers and tinkerers
Built our wondrous nation;
Then rent-seekers and ol’ fat cat
Reduced all to stagnation.

While those who risk, they may well lose;
But, some of us will gain.
There’s no way we may safely snooze,
Nor live free of all pain.

Chorus

Adventurers they crossed the earth
Seeking markets out,
Latching on to things of worth
And not held back by doubt.

Chorus

Through trial and error things get made,
Each novel new creation;
This is a spur to brand new trade
And needs no explanation.

Chorus

But how great tides they ebb and flow,
For tides we know must turn;
For fortune can both come then go,
Where folk they do not learn.

Chorus

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The first Queen ruler

Queen Seaxburgh (A.D. 672-674)

The land it seemed adrift as in a dream.
In summer’s sultry haze most seemed so still,
Yet ripples on the eddies in the stream
Reflected sunshine warm on waters chill.

Each bird that flew it flew with languorous flight,
With no clouds now, the sun baked some fields dry.
A warm portent of famine and of plight,
But torpid folk seemed too fatigued to sigh.

For where’s the strength to sigh in so much heat,
Where is the strength to do that much at all?
And all now droops before the Sun’s deceit
Save for one blackbird with its warning call.

Her old lord king was dead and gone to Grace,
This mother of a king now ruled his land.
She held the reins a short while in his place,
Though all was still – tumult was close at hand.

The envy of the lesser men so low
Just would not see a woman could be wise.
As envy at its height brings nought save woe,
A tumult stirred beneath the still blue skies.

From: “The Children of Gewis”

© Trevor Morgan, 15/10/2018

Dream of a sailor’s soul

In Memoriam

In February 1964 I was stood next to the guardrail on the quarterdeck of HMS Albion as the body of a young man, sewn up into canvas slid from under a white ensign and splashed into the Sula Sea. On returning to Singapore we buried another man who died on passage. Not all old days were good
Some things burn into memory, thinking of then I wrote this: