If Shakespeare Were a Sailor

Here is another in my series of poems about historical figures if they had been forced to choose different professions.

If Shakespeare Were a Sailor

                      after Charles Tomlinson

If Shakespeare were a sailor

he would have salted sonnets

on the sails and rollicked beneath

the billows above him, seared poetry

into the masts, and laid-by threads

of gossip from ale-swilling sea dogs

in the ports of Inverness and Aberdeen,

around bereft temples and animated

fountains of the Western Sea and more,

all while aching to luff these tidbits

into dramas once favorable winds

blew him back to London City

and into the arms of his beloved,

the theatre.

Marilyn Aschoff Mellor