Marah Poppe
Poetry Editor
It’s twenty-five past midnight, and
her rival is silent, for the first time in hours.
“Good morning, old man,” taps out her communicator.
“Do you know there are dispatchers for you at Cape Cod?”
It’s fine, thought her communicator.
Maybe she finally stopped for the night.
“CQD, CQD. SOS, SOS,
we have struck a ‘berg.”
Twenty-one years old, Harold Cottam
taps back to the operator,
“Should I tell my captain?”
“Yes, quick.”
Her response began a clock
no one yet knew they were racing,
forty-five minutes behind.
“Titanic is sinking.”
Life flew through the decks;
Captain Rostron barking orders,
holding on to hope.
“We’ll make our utmost speed
in going to her rescue.
Raise every ounce of steam possible.
We may reach her in four hours.
Do everything as quietly as possible,
as not to alarm our own passengers.”
Men whipped through the night
on gusts of wind, waking only those necessary,
gentle knocks upon doctor’s doors,
rattles on those of engineers,
every man rousing to life
to aid her journey.
Calling on his engineer, Rostron orders,
“Anything that might drain the steam pressure
is to be shut off. Pile every ounce of steam
onto those boilers that you can.
I want the Devil himself to
fear the heat of our engines.”
She begins drumming underfoot,
boilers working double, triple time,
slowly pushing herself harder and harder.
Carpathia, Rostron pleaded, please.
Give me just a little more.
We have to get there.
We have to at least try.
With no moon to guide them,
not a single star in the sky,
pushing his ship, his crew, everything,
Rostron remembers something.
An old wives’ tale, recanting,
“The ocean never gives up her dead.
But when you need her, when someone
needs you, her dead will fly with you,
protect you from harm. But, it’s the ocean,
There is always a cost.”
And so,
Rostron puts his faith in his God,
and trusts
the Carpathia will not meet the same fate.
Begging her to go faster, to boil herself alive
in a desperate attempt to save their rival,
flying blind into the darkness.
Passengers begin to stir,
whispers passing amongst them.
“What’s happening?” one man asks a quartermaster.
“We’re going north like hell,” he responds.
Carpathia rips through the water,
mirrored sea and moonless sky severed,
pressure building in the boilers,
reporting fifteen, maybe sixteen knots.
Ahead of her races the Pale Horse,
ice at his feet,
challenging her.
Rostron begs her for
Just a little more.
Please.
Give us five minutes.
Her crew had no way of knowing this,
but she maintained nearly
seventeen and a half knots
for hours.
One forty-five a.m., communication from the
rival Titanic has weakened.
Messages coming through
garbled, faint.
Twenty minutes later, at five past two,
Titanic falls silent.
The Pale Horse pulls ahead,
fading into the inky blackness
that claimed the Unsinkable Ship.
Two thirty-five.
“There! On the horizon! Look!”
My God, Rostron thinks. They’re still afloat.
A faint green light shines,
winks,
in the distance.
“Men! Fire rockets at fifteen-minute intervals!
Help is coming!”
Passengers now roared to life,
flurries of colors as nightgowns
and night suits and bare feet
pounded against the floors,
tossing anything they could overboard,
preparing for two thousand guests.
Four a.m.
A green flare low on the horizon.
Carpathia creeps onward,
the sun rising behind her,
revealing the last known location
of the Titanic.
Lifeboats.
The flares are lifeboats.
Survivors.
“Where is the Titanic?” asks Rostron
to surviving Fourth Officer, Joseph Boxhall.
“Gone,” he replied. “She sank at about
two-thirty.”
“Were there any on board?”
asked the Captain, knowing the answer.
“Hundreds.”
A brief pause.
“Maybe even a thousand.”
Silence befalls the ship.
Nothing remains.
No memories, no laughter,
no joy.
Nothing but that painful silence,
filled only by quiet, desperate cries
for those
lost to the water.
Eight thirty a.m.
Final survivors brought aboard.
Of the two thousand two hundred souls
Rostron and Carpathia prepared for,
Seven hundred and five boarded.
Slowly, silently, and somehow
heavier than before,
the RMS Carpathia completed
The Unsinkable Ship’s voyage.