Cruisers By Rudyard Kipling - Ghizela Rowe

Cruisers By Rudyard Kipling

As our mother the Frigate

Bepainted and fine

Made play for her bully

The Ship of the Line

So we her bold daughters

By iron and fire

Accost and decoy to our masters' desire

Now pray you consider

What toils we endure

Night-walking wet sea-lanes

A guard and a lure

Since half of our trade

Is that same pretty sort

As mettlesome wenches

Do practise in port

This is our office

To spy and make room

As hiding yet guiding the foe

To their doom

Surrounding confounding

We bait and betray

And tempt them to battle

The seas width away

The pot-bellied merchant

Foreboding no wrong

With headlight and sidelight

He lieth along

Till lightless and lightfoot

And lurking leap we

To force him discover

His business by sea

And when we have wakened

The lust of a foe

To draw him by flight

Toward our bullies we go

Till ware of strange smoke

Stealing nearer he flies

Ere our bullies close in

For to make him good prize

So when we have spied

On the path of their host

One flieth to carry

That word to the coast

And lest by false doublings

They turn and go free

One lieth behind them to follow and see

Anon we return being gathered again

Across the sad valleys

All drabbled with rain

Across the grey ridges

All crisped and curled

To join the long dance

Round the curve of the world

The bitter salt spindrift

The sun-glare likewise

The moon-track a-tremble

Bewilders our eyes

Where linking and lifting

Our sisters we hail

Twixt wrench of cross-surges

Or plunge of head-gale

As maidens awaiting

The bride to come forth

Make play with light jestings

And wit of no worth

So widdershins circling

The bride-bed of death

Each fleereth her neighbour

And signeth and saith

What see ye Their signals

Or levin afar

What hear ye God's thunder

Or guns of our war

What mark ye Their smoke

Or the cloud-rack outblown

What chase ye Their lights

Or the Daystar low down

So times past all number

Deceived by false shows

Deceiving we cumber the

Road of our foes

For this is our virtue

To track and betray

Preparing great battles

A sea's width away

Now peace is at end

And our peoples take heart

For the laws are clean gone

That restrained our art

Up and down the near headlands

And against the far wind

We are loosed

O be swift

To the work of our kind