Yikes! This was the poem on the English 12 provincial exam this year and needless to say it absolutely destroyed our students here in China. Nice poem - but man - very, very difficult for our kids:
The Cargo Hulks
Ramshackle barges
limp the coastal passages
carrying hogfuel and sulphur
to the ever-hungry mills –
food for the insatiable
bellies of the digesters –
ammunition for the smokestacks
to vomit at the gulls
Cargo hulks
stripped of masts and superstructure –
name rank identity –
any vestige of esteem,
they flounder through the waves
like great gutted whales
behind the strutting tug-boats
and they dream
of full sail –
ferocious high seas thundering –
merciless Antarctic gales –
the howling challenge of the Horn –
shrouds under full stress bulging
like a trumpet player’s cheeks
the pitching the nearly foundering
the forging on
to dolphin country
in the long rolling heat
past stark coasts where volcanoes growl
like old men in beds –
equatorial becalmings –
deckboards cracking in the sun –
parched voices croaking for a wind
on the hard green road
Blowing north again
before a good kicking gust
through starhung climbing nights
and new-minted days
to drop anchor at last
winner of the harrowing marathon
before new-raised cabins smoking welcome
in the pioneer bays
Memories melting
in the cold reality of the rain
they wake to ultimate winters by wharves
in the overwhelming stink
become mere pawns
in the same industrial equation
that fouls the water brown and foaming
along their flanks
