Title: The Wreck of the Hydrabad

Author: Ian Church

Publication details: Dunmore Press, 1978, Palmerston North

Digital publication kindly authorised by: Ian Church

Part of: New Zealand Texts Collection

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The Wreck of the Hydrabad

Hydrabad

Hydrabad

Year after year a doleful wreck,
She lying on the beach alone,
Beneath her prow, below her deck,
The bearded barnacles have grown.
From stem to stern her once proud form,
Now gaunt and weary on her bed,
Doth quiver during every storm,
Beneath dark skies of troubled lead.

Hydrabad, in days of yore,
With pennant proud and helmsman skilled
Stout hearts across the ocean bore —
Our pioneers, rude homes to build
In this fair land, of wealth untold,
Of snowy peaks, and deep ravines,
Of fertile plains and reefs of gold,
And kauris tall mid tropic scenes.

Then came a night, with fog and rain,
The vessel's helm was paralysed,
The look-out craned his neck in vain,
"Watch out for shoals", the mate advised —
Too late! For with a scraping sound
She struck upon a storm-swept beach.
A stately ship, she was aground;
The sand to her clung like a leech.

page 8

Time with his scythe, relenting not,
Surveys this prize with careless air.
He says: "Your wooden planks shall rot,
Your bulwarks rust, your ribs stand bare.
So now, proud ship, lie there alone,
In every storm your frame shall shake".
Silence, and ghostly Time is gone;
The seagulls wheel, the salt waves break.

Hydrabad, as years drag on,
In silence watches three wars pass.
Leviathon comes up anon
Near this old friend, to breathe his last.

Immune from harm, within her hull,
A jellyfish at anchor lies.
Aloft, there soars a screaming gull....
The tides about her ebb and rise.

A. G. A.

Tararua — The Magazine of the Horowhenua College, December 1948.