The Wave

I went back to the place
where I was born
to look for the ones who could live for me.
Eight years of nights, I toiled and lasted,
before I glimpsed the dawn
in which I’d depart
as fully and solely as once I came;
without one of those for whom I’d looked.
For a while before I thought I had them,
but they dwindled and dispersed
like the whites of a wave,
throwing pain to my jaw as they turned their backs
till three nights ago, with an angel,
I transgressed; and she warned me after,
in a delicate embrace, to keep a clear head
and not lose myself.
“Might it not be me,” I should have said,
“that truly amounts to the gravest loss?”
Upon a mighty sea swell the wind once slapped
and the sun once shone,
and the sails, thick and slacked,
waved proudly above,
and I remember this because,
in a ship, I sat
among friendly faces, surveying the ocean —
a miraculous view of perpetuity —
and the wave beneath us that gently rocked;
but as I gaze now from side to side,
I see just the woolly cliffs round the rim of this place
in which I have since been shipwrecked and lost.
How soon it crashed upon the shore;
amidst the fury, I did not stop to see it
and now I can muse on
its lasting so briefly; its greatness, too,
possibly just the illusion
of a marooned sailor’s youth and confusion.