Page:Rudyard Kipling's verse - Inclusive Edition 1885-1918.djvu/401

"He has taken my little parrakeets that nest beneath the Line,
"He has stripped my rails of the shaddock-frails and the green unripened pine.
"He has taken my bale of dammer and spice I won beyond the seas,
"He has taken my grinning heathen gods and what should he want o' these?
"My foremast would not mend his boom, my deck-house
patch his boats;
"He has whittled the two, this Yank Yahoo, to peddle for shoe-peg oats.
"I could not fight for the failing light and a rough beam-sea beside,
"But I hulled him once for a clumsy crimp and twice because he lied.
"Had I had guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm,
"I had run him up from his quarter-deck to trade with his own yard-arm;
"I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw,
"And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw;
"I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot In the rocking dark,
"I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark;
"I had lapped him round with cocoa-husk, and drenched him with the oil,
"And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil;
"I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard in the mesh,
"And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh;
"I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws,