The Widow’s Tide

Three winters past, the masthead’s splintered grin
Had pierced the fog, a ghostly serenade,
As he, with fingers tracing her moon-pale skin,
Swore tides would bend to bring him back, unswayed.
“By autumn’s rust,” he vowed, “these arms shall claim
Your twilight form, no storm my heart deterred.”
Yet now the cliffside hawthorns breathe his name
In blooms that wilt before the song is heard.

Her cottage crouches where the heather dies,
Its timbers warped by centuries of grief.
There, mantled in the hearth’s accusing eyes,
She spins his absence to a threadbare sheaf
Of maybes—murmurs that the waves might bring
Some token wrung from Neptune’s briny keep:
A buckle, salt-cured, from his boots’ last spring,
Or the north star, drowned shallow in the deep.

But dawns congeal to dusk, and still the cove
Grows only kelp’s black ribbons on its stones.
The gale-torn nets she mends with fingers numb
Hold catches of the sea’s indifferent bones—
A crab’s husk, brittle as their final kiss,
A bottle gnawed to milky opacity,
And once, a locket cold against her wrist
That held not his face, but the ocean’s vacancy.

One eve, when tides retreated like betrayed
Lovers, exposing reefs’ cracked vertebrae,
She traced the path where his lost ship had played
At charades with fate—now barnacled decay.
There, in the gloaming’s blue and breathless vault,
The waves spat forth a truth long clenched in foam:
A plank, its iron nails a grim assault,
Carved with half a heart—her name, alone.

The storm came howling as she clutched the wood,
A feral chorus to her throttled cry.
The cliffside lanterns, snuffed by winds that could
Not bear her grief’s raw luminosity,
Left night to gnaw the island to the core.
She stood, a wraith in rain’s relentless scour,
And watched the tempest build its crashing lore
Upon the rocks where love had lost its hour.

“You swore—” her voice, a shard of shattered glass,
Cut through the thunder’s mockery. No reply
But the sly hiss of waves that mass and mass
Their liquid lies beneath a bleeding sky.
The squall’s cold fingers pried her from the ledge
Where faith had perched so long on weary wings,
And in that plunge, the sea’s engulfing pledge
Eclipsed the shore’s unyestered whisperings.

Now fishermen, in tones the color of peat,
Tell of a glimmer near the northern shoal—
A woman’s form, enmeshed in moonlight’s sheet,
Who gathers wreckage to her phantom soul.
They trim their sails, avert their weathered eyes
From where the breakers coil like adders’ tongues,
For none will risk the ocean’s hungry spies
Or name aloud the dirge the reef has sung.

The isle keeps vigil, cliffs like hunched scribes recording
Each crash and sigh in ledgers of wet stone.
The gulls still carve their psalms, the surf, its hoarding
Of relics love and salt have made their own.
And in the village, where the widows knit
Their sorrow into shawls of muted grays,
They speak of tides that never quite forget
The weight of hearts surrendered to their maze.

Some say the sea, in capricious remorse,
Returns at times to cradle what it stole—
A comb, a boot, a compass sans its course—
And lays them gently on her granite shoal.
But in her cottage, where the hearth’s last spark
Grew cold as vows that breach the lips and die,
The north wind sifts through shadows left by dark,
And finds no throat to shape its lullaby.

The hawthorns bloom, the hawthorns shed their white,
The gulls’ stark vowels score the endless blue,
The tide erases, tide rewrites, tide’s sleight
Of hand that makes all certainties untrue.
And far from shore, where light and water blend
Into a sigh no mortal chart defines,
Two shadows dance—not lovers, but the friend
And foe that every broken heart enshrines:

One, the promise, bright as dawn’s first knife,
One, the silence where that brightness led.
They waltz beyond the marginland of life,
A duet for the living and the dead.
The island turns its face toward the spray,
Its cliffs still bearing where her fingers clung,
And learns, by heart, the price the tides will pay
For every “forever” ever rashly sung.