Welcome to Litsy!

The sailor trod over the glittering glass
A-dazzle with jags of red
And came to a man leaning over a wall
With a shadow above his head.

"Can you tell me the nearest First Aid Post"
The sailor said to the man,
But the lounging figure made no reply
For the back of his head was gone.

The sailor wiped the sweat from his face
And he laughed in a hapless way,
"O Christ! little fish" he said to the babe
"This isn't no place to stay"

A babe was born in the reign of George
To a singular birth-bed song,
Its boisterous tune was off the beat
& all of its words were wrong;
But a singular song it was, for the house
As it rattled its ribs & danced,
Had a chorus of doors that slammed their jaws
& a chorus of chairs that pranced.
And the thud of the double-bass was shot
With the wail of the floating strings,
And the murderous notes of the ice-bright glass
Set sail with a clink of wings

Seeing a Spitfire then a Lancaster Bomber flying over on their way to a nearby airshow put me in mind of WWII, which put me in mind of Mervyn Peake's poem of the London Blitz.
Being an artist as well as a poet, Peake was recruited as an official war artist, and his experience of the horrors of the blitz and of the Nazi concentration camps informs Peake's always quixotic verse and illustrations.