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Silver Lady

She wasn't born to beauty, and she wasn't born to wealth,
And there's many wouldn't notice her at all,
But if those of us who love her should stand up to drink her health,
Best stand with us, or be ready for a brawl.
She's our home, and she's our mother; she's our nation; she's our friend,
And a time or two she's almost been our tomb;
And she'll play our freedom games with us until the bitter end,
While making sure we've lots of running room.
It's a sacred symbiosis when you work a spacer's deck,
Cause without the ship you'd soon be cold and blue,
But the greatest ship that ever sailed is just a drifting wreck
Without the little bugs inside her called her crew.
There're forty thousand Fireflies out there drilling through the black,
Playing permutations of the transport game,
But there's only one whose bulkheads feel like home against my back,
And "Serenity" is that lovely lady's name.

Paul Haynie
January 18, 2003

This is a bit of a reach; it's a poem about a space ship, specifically the "Firefly" Class Transport Vessel "Serenity" which was the 10th member of the cast of the short-lived TV series "Firefly" last fall. So it wouldn't seem to have that much to do with building and sailing small, primarily wooden boats...

Except... A boat is still a boat, and the sea is still the sea, and there is something about a mariner's heart that just makes him DIFFERENT from a landsman. And whenever one of your contributors stops talking about HOW and says a few words about WHY, I find my self thinking that many of your readers would enjoy this poem.

Paul Haynie