I have drowned my soul
In the music of this land,
The Woods, the shores, the hills,
Until I have forgotten how to live
Anywhere else.
The tossing of the sea,
The stillness of sand in silver turmoil,
The storm-beaten trees bent in prayer…
But it is a life worth living
If your soul is on the speaking terms
With Poetry.
Here the rarity of the sun’s visits
Is like a miracle,
Coloring shores and harbors bright blue,
And that Summer sea seems to turn
Us cold-beaten Northerners back into ourselves
Making us yearn for human companionship.
Streams always seem to whisper
something to themselves in the hollow,
Making each other laugh.
It is rather infectious
Summoning me back
To my childhood’s flights of fancy.
The woods crave our loneliness…
Trees we once climbed and swung from,
Bound with our sorrows and joys…
They have become companions
Disrobing us of our worldliness
Until we again become purple shadows under
Their leafy wings.
I have spent mornings drinking beauty,
Walking along coastal paths
While growing wings
Spun of white surf sprinkled with the gold dust
Of dawn.
I have learned to love the sea’s every mood,
Cast unto rugged gray cliffs
rising steeply from blue coves,
Or Caresses smothered unto white sandy dunes.
But the sea is never lonely,
It is full of whispering, beckoning, moaning
Of some great sorrow
Or great joy,
Imposed upon the land without excuse,
While solitary humans, like myself,
wander, awed and spellbound,
On the outer frame of it.
Solitude is on the shores
Of Summer twilights,
When the sun is falling
And the old keeps its tryst
With the days it loved.
You will harness your soul then
In the dimming sea,
In the whisk-away surf,
Clothing yourself in the fairy grace
Of whispering trees
And rolling waves of sunset
Gradually disappearing
Into the lost lands
Of beyond.
I live in the deep
breathing through a straw.
I see a world of brilliant colors, shafts of angelic light
and inscrutable darkness nobody else sees.
But every time I take a breath I struggle
to get enough oxygen from the surface
To fill my lungs.
I sometimes heave just to grasp at
What others take for granted.
