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As a school child, I did not take full seriously
the food chains my teachers preached.
Linking old maids, cats, clover, cows,
and cheese alienated alliteration,
pierced funny bone--
but not the one between my ears.
Now I know that such data
should have jarred my very marrow.
I do not for an instant believe my teachers, either,
knew whereof they spake.
With my own children,
I am guilty of schoolish catechisms,
often put them through their humane paces,
send them to learn with schools of fish.
"Why was 'Shoal Cape' renamed Cape Cod?
Why is that poor flat fish, that poor man's dish,
homaged as 'the sacred cod'?
Why does Lunenburg's St. Ann,
oldest Presbyterian church in Canada,
rise spire-tipped with cod and barbel?
Does its congregation really worship Cod?"
I don't dilate on cod's declension,
just coil the circles, chains it floats.
"Baccalau--dried cod--
was blessed by Sour England's Fasting Laws.
Much later, Planter Culture wed Cod Aristocracy,
angled with cod to perpetuate their line.
West Indies sugar plantations needed
cheap labor cheaply fed,
sent to Africa for slaves,
to New England for cod to feed them.
A Dutchman turned molasses' waste
to rhumbullion, then to rum.
Bad times bequeathed
Nova Scotian rum-runners to the line.
Laden with French-Island loads,
they ran American Coast Guard gauntlet.
The guile of this Banana Brigade was legend--legion.
They hid their rum in false-bottomed vessels,
disguised their ships after every Coast Guard pass,
created names so unfathomable
the Coast Guardsmen threw up their sails and left.
If all else failed, these sly Nova Scotians
poured engine oil on hot exhausts
to make smoke screens for themselves.
(Perhaps they should have,
like their fellows in those clumping wooden shoes,
flung their sabots to foul Coast Guard engines,
an advanced case of sabotage.)
All but Mr. William McCoy watered down
the rum they fetched--
smart rum-buyers--yes, you guessed it!--
bought only 'the real McCoy.'"
My daughter's favorite "capstan chanty"?
"Shenandoah," borrowed by the sailors from the slaves
to sing only on the homeward passage.
I tell my children, gently, sweetly,
but with emphasis nonetheless,
of kits, cats, sacks, and wives--
of cod, slaves, sugar, molasses, rum,
hoping--a long reach--for the right note among
fantasic, bombastic...fatalistic.
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