Monday, December 7, 2009

Leviathans


The bowl of the sky was lavender with the dying night.
Polkovnik Mikhail Kozlov’s mighty vessel rocked gently
at tether. A life-long mariner, Kozlov handled the ship’s
easy roll without thinking of it. His mind was on other things.
On this morning, the morning of eighteen October 1896,
the tsar’s proudest ships were moving to break the Japanese
stranglehold on Vladivostok. Even now, the sleek, powerful
hulls of the Baltic Fleet were slicing through the blue waters
of the Korean Strait on their way to punish the
Imperial Japanese Navy.

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