1 The ocean was clean, and full of fish The sailors built their boats And learned to dance with the waves The bats would swoop around at night And never lose their way Like the mariner who needed no chart The sea would sound its own alarm For the fisherman to hear As he gentled home in the curling fog Ten thousand years of history Are strangled in the nets Of the floating long-haul factories As another man, another kind of man, Slips solemnly away To find again a peace we all have lost   2 A cantankerous old fossil called Bert Had a molar that started to hurt But the dentist, he found, Wanted twenty-five pound And the pliers were free, said old Bert