For many years you served as sentry,
O'er all the village fishing gentry.
Throughout the lonely moonless nights
You smiled with beacon on the plights
Of wind and wiles, of seas and shores
Above bold men who returned ne'er more.
Resounding, walled, the salt sea cries,
As sweat from bated widow's eyes
Whelms through the nights so cold, forlorn.
While waning screaks of gulls at morn
Scrape 'neath the grey to grit the shore,
Cold fishers waking vanish more.
"How very quaint," I hear them say,
The tourists passing on their way.
"Quite quaint," quite quaint, if words be plied
To seas men lived, and lives they died.
Some rent themselved upon the shore.
Most sail on by to return ne'er more.