POSH
Port-Outward Starboard-Home, a heavy trip
Made lighter by the apportionments of shade:
Red mountains steaming backward past the ship,
Their ravenous ravines, fanged palisade
With shorelines shaken in miraging air,
Dust-devils running on them, scorpion tails
hooked high to strike: out of the sun-side glare
White ladies leaning over polished rails.
Ahead blue roadway, trough of sequinned shoals:
At night wild stars thresh in the rigging's net.
The keel slides down the globe with freighted souls
Hulled in a common fate. The course is set,
Whether of proletariat or peerage,
Posh people or poor buggers in the steerage.
The Times Saturday Review, Oct. 3, 1992
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