Barracoon

by Peter Dreyer (April 2024)

Ocean, soaking me to the bone
Revive me, for I cannot sleep
And a perplexing thing so peek
In early morning at my phone.
–
Gazing greedy, far off the bight,
Rafting our shipwrecked barracoon,[*]
Deceive myself that some day, soon
Some happy shore may heave in sight.
–
Protectress Gorgo, turn to stone
The blind who ravage Earth in play —
Reboot your vengful stare today,
Redeem the road our moguls roam!
–
She is not here. But far away
The noise of wreck begins again,
And awful through the icy rain
On dying ocean breaks the day.[†]
–

_________
[*] Barracoon = a slave holding pen, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracoon; see [Sir] V. S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon, reviewed by Peter Dreyer in The San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, April 22, 1973.
[†] A respectful nod to Lord Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam for shameless purloining of phrasing and metre. “If you must steal, steal from the best, who can well afford it.”

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Peter Richard Dreyer is a South African American writer. He is the author of A Beast in View (London: André Deutsch), The Future of Treason (New York: Ballantine), A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press; new, expanded ed., Santa Rosa, CA: Luther Burbank Home & Gardens), Martyrs and Fanatics: South Africa and Human Destiny (New York: Simon & Schuster; London: Secker & Warburg), and most recently the novel Isacq (Charlottesville, VA: Hardware River Press, 2017).

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