The Lune
Lyrics:
A lonesome grave for a nameless lad,
Upon a rabbit warren, unsanctified sand.
Not a dozen years upon his hands,
but never, no never, to be an unchained man.
The tide brings home the Lune’s trading boats,
Packed with tobacco, and cotton, and the slaves it has stole.
Three days ashore that boy the called Sambo,
was found on dead on the floor, given no coffin no pall.
Caught fast hooked on the same old line,
Entwined in the net of a tiger’s design.
Heaven saw another lamb meets its end,
Letting the wolves herd the flock we failed again.
A becalmed place between salt marsh and sky;
A limbo of sand bird and curlew cries.
Unearthly to you, a land strange to I,
A shoal of lapwings sing you a lullaby.
Mawkish words and reproachful signs,
Cannot lessen dead pale men’s crimes.
Painted stones, flowers, toys trinkets lie;
Sincerely and sweetly on a child’s grave side.
Row strong against the same old vice,
Indentured to service some devil’s spite.
Cruelty taught us another nursery rhyme,
For which a little boy blue suffered and died.
So, here he lies at the liminal line,
Among sea oak and cord grass under onyx skies.
But mock not the child, for only the child knows,
How to learn from and honour,
And be brave for his bones.
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Music
How to play the song.
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Podcast
A podcast considering Britain and the West’s role in slavery and racist colonialism.
about
The story surrounding the grave of a nameless boy who was kidnapped as a slave and brought to Sunderland point only to die there within days, was one I had heard before. It was only on visiting the graveside, that strange quiet and eerie salt marsh, that I felt the need to write about it.
I’m sure many mawkish folk songs and badly rhymed poems have tackled it before – although I haven’t heard any. Maybe it was the time and place, the fact I was in Lancaster as stranger passing through, grieving a loss and stressed by circumstance. Seeing the estuary in a hue of a foreign light.
I found the tune of a lullaby and backed it with the guitar, the lyrics came fairly easily. I thought of the Lamb by William Blake and the poem’s counterpart which were written about 60 years after the boy was buried. The Lamb was deliberately written naïvely, as a child might write.
I think the story of Sambo’s Grave can so easily be mistreated, even appropriated. The name alone has plainly racist connotations. I thought of how the act of a child leaving a tribute on the graveside has more weight and sincerity, than one from a white man such as myself. An instinctual act of kindness and respect worth more than a performed song of an adult’s keening.
Perhaps this is what Blake meant when telling us not to mock the infant’s faith.