Herman Melville

Said the first mate to the ship captain, «Oh captain, my captain!
I’ve not read the last page of whatever novel you’ve been writing down below
but the bow is bending beneath the weather and your men hopelessly row against
a current that I hope you can control…»
So?"
So are the chapters erasable?"
Beneath waves of pipe tobacco and ashen ink that clings to the end of his quill,
words spill across the oak tree trunk fashioned into a table, set before the
author as he composes his fables… calmly, «sailor, I’ve enabled you to sail
where I’d not and you’ve got a colorful tongue, boy, a rudder that rots at the
root of the tree as the ship that you’ve built falls apart at its seams and you
steer us deeper out into the seas.»
The whole company’s drowning.
Thinks, god, that’s so unfair to me. «But I’ve got a family!»
Well then, father, you’d better feed your children, and stop blaming me for the
immovable grasp that you have on the wheel!
It’s not like you didn’t ask to hang your own sails, to raise your flag on the
mast, to set course for a trail that followed gold to unknown waters in the
mouth of a whale, so when the mast breaks in half, don’t you say that I’ve
failed."
And slowly, the sailer bows out the door, feigning humility, as the floor
creaks, crushing worms that crawled out of his boots beneath the weight of such
a scolding.
That wormwood killed the crew, embittered them against the ship captain’s last
discipline out of love for you.
My crewmen and my brothers and my friends and my son, all sank beneath the
current pulled by the gravity of what I’d done, and these seas and the moon
reflect the image of the one that left me without excuse once the end had come.
«Oh captain, my maker, I’ve got nothing left to say, would that I have praised,
with nature, your invisible name but I bit off my fingers and left myself
maimed, with a hook that’s replaced years of pointed blame, It’s too late!
Is it too late to calm the waves?
And would you turn your face away to drive me to grace?
I am drowning!
Awake!
Walk the plank in my place.
Walk the plank!
Walk the plank!
With my last words I say:
Praise be the maker of my fate for the suffering he ordains.»