The Great Adventurer

The seemingly suitless suitor
requires a suit of armour,
urgently,
for he hears the wooden ships are leaving the harbour.
Shining metal suited his dreams best,
as he imagined his journey upon a wooden horse
across the waves,
on the great conquest without a course.
No maps were plotted, charts designed in no ink,
to draw up directions for the slightest sighting of Helen’s dress.
The great adventurer, still standing
on the seashore reciting Donne’s verse,
is mortally frightened by the tyrant pikes in blue,
who in groups devour all ships set afloat.
So the suitor can but “like wish and adore”
with his rags of heart and a beating remote,
for he truly needs a suit of armour no more.

By JPV

Copyright March 2006