The week in verse: Message In A Bottle
Twin five-year-old Essex girls who put a message in a bottle were visited by the Spanish lady who found it in Tenerife...
message in a bottle
Message In A Bottle
Given to the grey North Sea
Its tireless roll and sigh
In the hazy days of August
with an Essex sun sat high
Like a rubicund midshipman
a bloodshot sailor’s eye
Longing for a voyage
While end of summer furls
its message in a bottle
From the little English girls
How long it must have drifted
past estuaries and sands
By Dover and Le Touquet
with Brighton to the west
Slipping through the Channel
and bobbing on by Brest
Across the Bay of Biscay
towards the north of Spain
In somersaulting tempests
Impervious to the rain
The howling gales above it
The North Atlantic swirls
A wild, unwitting postman
of the little English girls
Till one day in the winter
After months and many miles
The bottle and its message
reach the bright Canary Isles
Where a Spanish lady finds it
picks it up and smiles.