Many people owe their lives to this system.....

The airwaves were for the sailors
                                            [their only connection with life,
with family, with their beloved...
                                      [and now a decision, cut like a knife,
this perennial bond, this romance,
            [with the world that is leaving..

The crew, all of us, were in grieving...
to me and to them it was
                        [a plan case of thieving. 

Suddenly.....
    [and completely unexpectedly, 
you might say quite aggressively,
the wireless radio* on our ship
                                          [went silent forever. 

The order was explicit....
      [it would not returned to operation ever.

An international agreement,
            [in the future, ships will communicate
in another way and somehow decided
                                               [to excommunicate
"radiotelegraphy", with all the emotional load
                                                          [that exists around it. 
Seafarers and wireless for 100 years were tightly knit.

In the next port....................
                                               the farewell to the Sparks*,            *wireless operator
and soon will follow the farewell to the post office,
             [to romanticism, to communism (poor Marx).


In the strange new world of quanta and cyberspace,
unfortunately for us, the romantics, there is no place,
and the solution is,
                       [together with our memories to flee...

So let's wander with some flying Dutchman*
                                                 [in the boundless sea....

_______________________________________________

*Extract from "The Broken Mooring Line", an experiential
poetic work // page c61// e-mail: pmataragas@yahoo.com //
Texts and Narration: Odysseus Heavilayias - ROTTERDAM //
Language adjustments and text adaptation: Kellene G Safis - CHICAGO//
Digital adaptation and text editing: Cathy Rapakoulia Mataraga - PIRAEUS//
_______________________________________________________________


* Wireless radio, Wireless telegraphy is the transmission of electric telegraphy signals without wires (wirelessly). It is now used as a historical term for early radio telegraphy systems which communicated with radio waves, although when the term originated in the late 1800s it was also used for a variety of other experimental techniques for communicating telegraphically without wires, such as photoelectric and induction telegraphy.
Wireless telegraphy came to mean Morse code transmitted by radio waves (electromagnetic waves), initially called "Hertzian waves" and by 1910 universally referred to as "radio", and the term has been largely replaced by the more modern term "radiotelegraphy".
Two United Nations-chartered organizations, the International Maritime Organization and the International Telecommunications Union, are responsible for defining and regulating maritime telecommunications systems. The most current system adopted by these two organizations is the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, or GMDSS. Morse wireless telegraphy, used by ships for distress and safety communications since the beginning of the century, was discontinued by the USCG in 1995, and ceased worldwide on February 1, 1999. Many people owe their lives to this system.

* The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship that can never make port and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. The myth is likely to have originated from 17th-century nautical folklore. The oldest extant version dates to the late 18th century. Sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries reported the ship to be glowing with ghostly light. If hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman will try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship is a portent of doom.

  the tales of a greek sailor