“You’re scheduled for the watch,” Telfer recalled telling a junior officer. “How are you doing in poetry?”
“Oh my God, no – do I have to do this?” came the response from the officer.
That was exactly what Telfer wanted to hear: it meant he could take over – and write a poem – himself.
On each naval watch, an officer records the ship’s daily vital signs, which may include a timeline of the ship’s movements or details of its anchorage, the status of its power systems, ships spotted nearby, and missing or injuries on board. For many ships, logs are retained by the Navy for 30 years before being transferred to the National Archives. It is generally a dry administrative document.
But a long-standing Navy tradition is that the first entry in the New Year’s deck journal can be written in verse. It is not known when or why this tradition began; the first mentions date from 1926, according to the Navy, and seem to indicate that the tradition was already established. The practice continued over the following decades: the New Year’s verse was once a popular enough part of Navy life that the official All Hands magazine and the independent Navy Times held annual competitions to decide the best poems. , and a Navy-trained astronaut even logged it on the International Space Station in the early hours of 2001.
In recent times, the practice has faded. In the 1960s there were hundreds of poems a year; over the past six years, that number has been counted by the dozens, with just 44 this year. Last year, however, the Navy revived a New Year’s deck log contest, raising the possibility that this dying tradition may be rescued and even reinvigorated.
Over the decades, Navy logbook poems have varied from rhyming couplets to those set to the tune of Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” and those inked while placidly in the port to those saved in the midst of battle. (“Commenced fire main battery turret two / And a happy new year Victor Charlie to you,” reads an entry from the USS New Jersey.) They describe enemies as varied as Axis powers, homesickness, covid-19 – and even New Years. midwatch itself, as one writer lamented in 1966:
With the parties, the gay horns are blowing
Here sits sunken, dark me
Thirst for wine, in the prime of life
Write third-rate poetry.
“It’s like a lot of traditions. They come and go over time, and some will disappear altogether,” says retired Rear Admiral Samuel J. Cox, director of Naval History and Heritage Command, which manages the new competition. But Navy leaders “felt this one deserved an opportunity to continue.”
Traditions like this connect sailors to their past value, he told me, and remind them “that they are part of something bigger than themselves.” That goes for Cox, too, who went the lyrical route during a New Year’s Eve midwatch in the 1980s while serving at a shore facility in DC. He doesn’t remember much about the experience, except to say that his poetry was “ugly”.
Submissions to the competition are initially judged by deck-log program manager Alexis Van Pool, who selects 10 to forward to a committee of current and former sailors who select three finalists. Cox then determines first, second and third place. The winner receives a copper piece from the USS Constitution, the still-afloat Navy ship launched in 1797. The three runners-up receive a small medallion, known as a challenge coin, and a framed copy of their poem.
The mandate to still provide all the necessary details of the watch – a stew of numbers, abbreviations and last names – requires some contortion. “That part was a little difficult,” says Lt. jg Sarah Weinstein, 24, who wrote this year’s winner with her night shift colleagues on the USS Lake Champlain. Needing to describe the ship’s power use and general direction that night, they came up with the coupling: “2B line engine, starboard aft / 1 and 2 GTG [gas turbine generators] turn so we can continue browsing.
More than 50 years earlier, in the South China Sea, it was Telfer’s last New Year’s Day on a ship, and he had long wanted to be part of the poetry tradition. Having taken over from the reluctant junior officer, he wrote eloquently in the deck journal of the ship’s passage to Subic Bay, Philippines, and the recent firing of her guns for the first time since the Korean War. It read in part:
Through rough seas we sail with ease
In strange swirls amid frothy curls
And always flows backwards.
A white gold moon soon shows its fullness
Which mask the night with starry light
With rolling stays. …
Silenced tompion guns
Salt spray proof fixing
belies the roar they put down
Telfer spiced up the challenge by modeling his poem on the structure of Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” which caught his fascination after his father read it to him as a child. “I took three days to write this thing,” says Telfer, who later served as the commander of a Navy SEAL team, then spent two decades as a lawyer and now lives in Coronado, Calif. “I remember when the captain saw this, [he] said, ‘Dude, you’re in the wrong profession.’ ”
It’s an extremely rare dose of voice for an official Navy document, and Telfer, now 81, says he took that responsibility seriously. The poets of the deck journal do not speak for themselves, but for the whole ship. “I didn’t have an ego that thought the world was waiting for a message from me,” Telfer recalled. The closest he feels to offering a message, felt starkly by those aboard the USS Weiss, is in the last stanza:
While shipmates sleep the watch we keep
And ask with silent prayer
Stop the fighting, this new year brings peace
Danny Freedman is a writer in Memphis.
