fog.html

---
title: Fog
description: A poem by C. Robert Hilton.
keywords: poem,poetry,sea poetry, robert hilton, Robert Hilton, Hilton, hilton
layout: hh
---

<p>Pearl blankness and the watery world must pause.
<br>The roadstead packed with many ships close moored.
<br>An anchor rattles down its clattering hawse.
<br>You’d swear it was your own, so close aboard.</p>

<p>Blank stillness hiding unseen bulks of fear.
<br>Invisible, but vivid to the mind.
<br>Strange eerie sounds, but how far or how near?
<br>Gigantic creatures suddenly gone blind.</p>

<p>The experience by day is something weird.
<br>Most sounds are muffled, others may reflect.
<br>The outside world, or you, have disappeared
<br>And all the windows show a pearl effect.</p>

<p>By night an aura round the masthead light
<br>Is often the first sign that fog is there,
<br>Except when you have any lights in sight,
<br>And even as you watch they disappear.</p>

<p>Fog was like this before sea radar came
<br>To aid us and to clarify the scene.
<br>And even now it’s very much the same.
<br>As dangerous as nitro glycerine.</p>

<p>And so is radar. We must use it right,
<br>Although it cannot lie in any way.
<br>Someone unskilled, or by an oversight,
<br>Can misinterpret what it seems to say.</p>

<p>A radar signal closing fine to port
<br>In narrow waters where you can’t turn wide.
<br>You don’t know she’ll do as you think she ought,
<br>Give starboard wheel and pass down your port side.</p>

<p>And so to gain more time you stop your ship,
<br>But still the other holds her lethal course.
<br>You come astern, but sternway won’t outstrip
<br>That onrush, only mitigate its force.</p>

<p>She’s so close on the screen you have to lift
<br>Your eyes, and there she is advancing near,
<br>Deliberate as continental drift,
<br>And edging to one side, but will she clear?</p>

<p align="right"><small><i>&copy;2008 C. R. Hilton</i></small>