Battleship
Battle stations. General quarters sounds.
Take your places. All hands brace for impact.
Turn that dial. Crank that lever. The hounds
of hell are on our tail. Windscreen is cracked.
Someone get eyes on that boat. “Cap’n, it’s
on our six,” says the midshipman. “We need
more speed right now before we’re blown to bits.”
On us, they’ve drawn a bead. Our radar reads
a firing solution. Take the shot
then fire at will. Man down and overboard–
Someone toss a life preserver before
he drowns. Deploy decoys. Ahead a fjord!
We won’t scuttle. We’ve still got torpedoes.
We’ll mine that victory before we go!
—
I took this picture in Hawaii while inside a battleship. My sister and I had a great time wandering around looking at all the dials, levers and cranks. I thought they were pretty damned (extra)ordinary.
In response to The Daily Post’s weekly photo challenge: “(Extra)ordinary.”
great photo and sonnet…i loved the movement of it; made me feel like I was there…
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Thank you! I watched a lot of war movies growing up.I found the pic in on old album and the sonnet wrote itself.
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🙂 don’t you just love it when words spill out? I am a war film buff too…I studied History (among other things at university) and WWII has always been my favorites of all the wars to study…
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My dad must have watched every WWII movie or documentary ever filmed. I saw them too because we only had one tv in the house that received actual channels.
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🙂 it must have been wonderful growing up in your household….we had two channels (one if the weather outside was bad) when I was a kid so any and all tv time was family time 🙂
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We had about 5 channels most of the time except, like you, when the weather was bad and then we had the cosmic ray background, aka snow on our tv.
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ah, yes, I know that ‘snow’ channel all too well 🙂
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Only channel I get now since I don’t have cable. Not that I’d watch it if I had it which is why I didn’t spring for it
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🙂 that is not a bad thing!!
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