A favourite of mine, which reminds me of some of the grizzled old CPOs I have met, written by the late Charles Causley who was a Cornish writer and poet and who served in the Royal Navy in WW2:
CHIEF PETTY OFFICER
He is older than the naval side of British history,
And sits
More permanent than the spider in the enormous wall.
His barefoot, coal-burning soul,
Expands, puffs like a toad, in the convict air
Of the Royal Naval Barracks at Devonport.
Here, in depot, is his stone Nirvana:
More real than the opium-pipes,
The uninteresting relics of Edwardian foreign-commission.
And, from his thick stone box,
He surveys with a prehistoric eye the hostilities-only ratings.
He has the face of the dinosaur
That sometimes stares from old Victorian naval photographs:
That of some elderly lieutenant
With boots and celluloid Crippen-collar,
Brass buttons and cruel ambitious eyes of almond.
He was probably made a Freemason in Hong Kong.
He has a son (on War Work) in the Dockyard,
And an appalling daughter
In the WRNS.
He writes on your draft-chit,
Tobacco-permit or request-form
In a huge antique Borstal hand,
And pins notices on the board in the Chiefs’ Mess
Requesting his messmates not to
Lay on the billiard table.
He is an anti-Semite and has somewhat reactionary views,
And reads the pictures in the daily news.
And when you return from the nervous Pacific
Where the seas
Shift like sheets of plate-glass in the dazzling morning;
Or when you return
Browner than Alexander, from Malta,
Where you have leaned over the side, in harbour,
And seen in the clear water
The salmon tins, wrecks and tiny explosions of crystal fish,
A whole war later
He will still be sitting under a pusser’s clock
Waiting for tot-time,
His narrow forehead ruffled by the Jutland wind.
Petty Officer Charles Causley