'Bright plates and pannikins <br />To sail the seas around, <br />And a new donkey's breakfast <br />For the outward bound!' <br /> <br />Shanghaied in San Francisco <br />We brought up in Bombay <br />Where they put us afloat in an old Leith boat <br />That steered like a stack of hay. <br /> <br />We've sweltered in the Tropics <br />When the pitch boiled through the deck- <br />And saved our hides and little besides <br />In an ice-cold North Sea wreck. <br /> <br />We've drunk our rum in Portland <br />And we've thrashed through Bering Strait- <br />And we've toed the mark on a Yankee barque <br />With a hard-case Down-east mate. <br /> <br />We know the streets of Santos <br />And the loom of the lone Azores- <br />We've eat our grub from a salt-horse tub <br />Condemned from the Navy stores. <br /> <br />We know the quay of Glasgow <br />And the river at Saigon- <br />We've drunk our glass with a Chinese lass <br />In a house-boat at Canton. <br /> <br />We know the road to Auckland <br />And the light on Sydney Head- <br />And we've crept close-hauled when the leadsman called <br />The depth of the Channel bed. <br /> <br />They pay us off in London <br />And it's 'O for a spell ashore!' <br />But again we ship for the Southern trip <br />In a week or hardly more <br /> <br />For- it's 'Goodbye Sally and Sue' <br />And- 'It's time to get afloat-' <br />With an aching head and a straw-stuffed bed, <br />And a knife and an oil-skin coat. <br /> <br />Sing- 'Time to leave her, Johnny!' <br />Sing- 'Bound for the Rio Grande!' <br />When the tug turns back you follow her track <br />For a last, long look at land. <br /> <br />Then the purple disappears- <br />And only the blue is seen- <br />That will take our bones to Davy Jones <br />And our souls to Fiddler's Green.<br /><br />Anonymous Americas<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/seafarer-3/
