Sailing to Byzantium

Well this is an announcement to any friends, Roamans(spelled correctly) countrymen and relations that this will be the blog for our Cal 48 sailing blog instead of the previously posted URL which for reasons unbeknownst to me I cannot edit or add to any more. Perhaps it is too old and so this will be the sailing blog, the rant and rave blog, the politically incorrect blog, etc etc. I thought this would be a good time to post one of my favorite poems by William Butler Yeats and I will have to include John Masfield soon as well just for the sake of completeness. Mexico has become a bit swinish as you may have noticed and despite the advice of Janet Napolitano, we are planning on sashaying forth into battle to load up old koho with frijoles and avocados and heading over to Hilo on the big Island. Crew will be daughter Heidi and cousin Hal who have offered to crew over. From there we will lick our wounds, restock and head up the middle of the N Pacific to Alaska and try to link up with sister Shelley. We plan to do a little work on her bush cabin and wife Karlene will fly up sometime in August for our 25th and we plan a reunion voyage into Glacier Bay. I will try to post pics and commentary as I am able in Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you William Butler Yeats:

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.