Shipwreck

[Captain_Kuchiki]

Black clouds writhe and rain stampedes
on the slick wooden deck.
The mast creaks and groans
in protest.

Men shout and scream,
their voices whispers in the stormy din.
The oak vessel pitches
and squirms against Neptune's
frothy kingdom.

Rough rocks emerge up ahead
and the captain watches through his
telescope. He lowers his lenses
in resignation, his coat heavy with rain.

Rocks gnash and chew, and wood
cracks and shatters, crates of rum
and cannonballs spilling
into the icy sea. The dying ship
slumps and stalls, sailors thrown overboard.

Gold rays alight the next morn
and Neptune's sea gently laps
the carcass of the shipwreck,
forgetting its past violence for now.

Schooners patrol and sail with the winds
while the dead ship is unseen, its tragedy
an unsung tale.
Splintered planks litter the warm rocks
And skeletons bake in the heat.

A ghostly ping echoes through the sea
and explorers hunch over their screens, curious.
A steel and Plexiglas motorboat comes at last
and pokes its nose into history.

[hillwalker]

There are some arresting images in this poem - some working better than others.

'Stampeding rain' is difficult to picture (I assume it's the sound you were alluding to but it's a clunky metaphor all the same) and you continue to focus on the sounds above all else - rocks gnashing and chewing for instance. But many of the phrases you select have been used before in the context of a storm at sea and the way you report events is more journalistic rather than poetic.

At times it's just a list - A did this and that : B did this : C did this and that.
Apart from being monotonous to read we don't get the sense of how anyone on board felt when at the mercy of the elements in a stormy ocean. And the longer the piece goes onthe more it resembles reportage rather than poetry.

If you were to vary the pacing and style, trim away the mundanities like 'Men shout and scream' [!] and focus on the storm itself so that the reader feels he is there at the heart of the action rather than giving us the entire history of the shipwreck almost from launch to salvage it might work better.

H

[Fellsman]

Notwithstanding the mixture of metaphors, this somehow reminded me of the final movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (the Shepherds song of thanks for being brought safely through the storm), but alas, without the happy ending.

It's a pity the entire crew ended up in Davy Jones' Locker, a thoroughly miserable fate.


Fellsman

[Captain_Kuchiki]

Thanks for replying, guys. This is a poem I wrote for my college poetry class and my classmates peer-reviewed it, but here I've received some advice that my classmates didn't think of. What you see here is the current draft of the original poem I wrote, but it can always get a new draft!