The Mariner’s Lament Upon the Sands of Time
Where dunes like waves in petrified revolt
Rose cold and still, a mariner did tread,
His shadow carved by light’s unyielding blade.
No mast nor compass graced his blistered hand—
The sea, once mistress, now a siren’s ghost,
Had spat him forth upon this shapeless land,
To wander where no tide concedes a coast.
His lips, like parchment split by fever’s flame,
Recalled the brine, the salt-kissed winds of yore,
When sails drank deep the tempest’s silvered breath,
And stars, like nails, pinned heaven to the floor.
“O Memory, thou double-edged decree,”
He croaked, “Why paint in hues so vivid now?
The hearth’s embrace, the laughter of the quay—
All phantoms spun from sand and sweat and brow.”
A vulture circled in its patient gyre,
Its shadow stitching time to barren stone.
He clutched a locket, sealed with rust and ire,
Wherein a face, half-lost, still whispered home:
A maiden’s smile, ensnared in tarnished gold,
Her eyes twin lamps that once had lit his wake.
“Eleanor,” the winds intoned, cold, old,
“The shore you seek lies where all shores break.”
Three nights he dreamed of groves where figs hung ripe,
Their pulp like honeyed tears on branches frail.
Her voice, a breeze through willows, stripped his strife:
“What port awaits the man who fights the gale?”
But dawns arose, each crueler than the last,
To scorch the vision, leave the locket bare.
The desert, vast as regret, held him fast,
A prison built of air, and hope, and air.
At length, a shape emerged—a ship of dunes,
Its hull a mirage woven from despair,
Its sails the shroud of clouds that mocked the moon.
“Fair vessel,” cried he, “bear me hence to where
The past still blooms, a rose preserved in glass!”
He scrambled, clawed the slope with broken nails,
But keels of sand dissolved beneath his grasp,
And rigging hissed, a nest of asps, in trails.
Then came the phantom, robed in twilight’s gray,
A mirror of the self he’d left behind.
Its voice, the creak of oars in stagnant bays:
“You chase a dawn that darkness has maligned.
Each step you take etches the hourglass deeper—
The hands you plead with are your own, outstretched.
To drink from Lethe’s spring, why call it sweeter?
The wound you nurse is where the blade’s still etched.”
He wept. The stars, like salt, stung his cracked cheeks.
“If I am but the echo of my shame,
Then let the storm erase these hollow peaks,
And bury both my shadow and my name!”
The desert sighed, a lover’s faint reply,
And wrapped him in its smoldering embrace.
The locket sank, a spark snuffed in the sky,
As sands embraced their son of vanished race.
No epitaph but ripples on the plain,
Where winds rehearse their dirge in endless turns.
The sea, afar, sings triumph o’er the slain—
A hymn for hearts that break while the world burns.
So ends the tale of him who dared to grasp
The threads of time, to reweave destiny’s loom.
The desert keeps what oceans could not clasp:
A soul adrift between the grave and womb.
