Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

I like it,Gordon. When I worked for the newspaper in Ashtabula the managing editor, Dick Blood, told there wasn't a single block in the city that didn't have at least one family that lost someone on the Great Lakes. Some streets have many of them. I don't know if any from 'Bula were on the Fitzgerald.
Early every spring a small boat carries a priest out into the harbor for the Blessing of the Fleet. From the huge number of men who have died it doesn't seem to have helped much.
When I was there I spent a lot of time in the part of the city called Ashtabula Harbor. The busiest street was lined with bars and certain other establishments sailors like to visit. A great many foreign ships that come here via the St. Lawrence Seaway were usually in town. Every imaginable language is spoken. At different times some of them told me they would much rather be in a storm on the North Atlantic than Lake Erie. It is the shallowest of the Great Lakes so during a storm the waves hit in rapid succession without allowing time for recovery.
I once spent nearly an hour standing in the wind and rain on an embankment overlooking the harbor at Conneaut as one of the huge ore boats tried to fight its way past the breakwater and out into the lake. It was a fascinating sight, one that made me glad I was on shore.

This is my favorite of your poems so far. I can feel the storm, and the tragedy is foreshadowed dramatically by the description.

Ann

I guess it is one of my better poems. I tried to make it interesting by using an asortment of unusual (and not unusual) measures, like refering to the ship's length in yards instead of feet and using "kilotons" to refer to the weight of the ship's cargo on its faitful voyage and to the depth the ship sank as a tenth of a mile instead of 500 some feet. The poem can be clearly seen to be about the Edmund Fitzgerald, even though it never actually mentions the words "Edmund Fitzgerald." The graphic art depiction of the final moments of the Edmund Fitzgerald does look strangely calm, but that is because I made it using geometric shapes, however, it still gets the point across. The positions of the two pieces of the ship after breakup depicted in the picture is based on the lay of the wreck, with the front half right-side up and the back section upside down, The picture depicts the back section being capsized over into this upside down position. What finally broke the Fitzgerald we may never know. It could have been that the ship was taking on water and couldn't handle the extra weight or it could have been a rogue wave that stressed the ship beyond what it could handle, or mayby a combination of many unfortunate factors. May the 29 sailors who died that cold November night rest in peace.