The Hulks at Noontide

Beached, blemished, fallen out, run dead aground,
Their towers stranded black against the sky,
Thrown up to air, red-gobbeted they lie;
Where their last sailors burned, here they are drowned.
Rain, darker than the coldest fathom deep,
Picks at their sores. Their spreading scales of blood
Drip sandlike on the boiled and poisoned mud.
Less toxic than the cities, engines sleep.

The sun, whose hostile counterfeits they hurled,
Can barely tell the metal from the red,
Its radiations sunk in floating dust.
Extinct sharks of a lost, less silent world,
These fossils crumble, like the ashen dead.
Steel fish dissolve in continents of rust.

Sargon Purfleet