The Mariner’s Cradle

Here, in the grotto where the corals weep
Their stony hymns to shipwrecks fathoms deep,
Young William built his kingdoms out of foam—
A scepter-wielding prince with seashell crown.
His sister’s laughter (oh, that fleeting sound!)
Once wove itself through every creaking mast,
Now strangled by the tempests’ throttling grasp.
They swore upon a shard of driftwood pale,
Two palms pressed raw against the salt-stained rail:
“No wave shall part us, nor the north wind’s spite—”
But children’s oaths are cobwebs in the night.

Twenty winters gnawed the sailor’s cheeks,
Carving canyons where his smiles might sleep.
The *Albion*’s bones lay strewn in Neptune’s keep,
Her crew now minnows in the kelp’s dark sweep.
Yet still he watched, through squalls that scarred his sight,
For chestnut hair aflame in phantom light—
For Eleanor, who stayed where daisies twine
Their mortal rings around a coastal shrine.
Her letters, soft as moth wings, long since drowned,
Their inky hearts dissolved, their secrets unbound.

One twilight, when the tide sucked out its breath,
A figure bloomed where sea mist birthed the dead—
Not sister, but her ghost in kelp’s embrace,
With eyes like tide pools frozen into glass.
“Will,” spoke the wraith, her voice a whelk’s low song,
“You promised chains no storm could break for long.
Why does your compass flee from home’s true north?
Is memory’s map not etched where blood runs forth?”

He clutched the air where childhood’s shadow played,
Now choked by ropes of seaweed, darkly braided.
“The waves,” he croaked, “they stole my true intent—
Each league I sailed, the currents’ venom spent.
I fought the spitting gales with splintered oars,
But grief’s a keel that drags beneath the floor.”

Her form dissolved to phosphorescent mist,
Leaving a conch that whispered of their tryst:
*Find me where the hermit crabs compose
Their spiral hymns on beaches no one knows.*
For seven nights he traced the lunar road,
A drunkard stumbling under memory’s load,
Till in a cave where barnacles sang dirges,
He found her relics carved in tidal surges—

A dolloparison of clamshells cracked,
A braid of seagrass where her scent stayed trapped,
And ’neath a cairn of pebbles worn to sighs,
The ribbon she once wore at harvest tides.
The ocean roared its vinegar reproach
As William kissed the fraying scarlet throat—
That scrap of silk, now salt’s eternal bride,
Outlived the hands that tied it, warm and wide.

Dawn came—a blade of coral splitting sky—
To find him wading where the mermaids lie,
His pockets filled with stones from childhood’s shore,
Their edges smoothed by wishes made before.
The water licked his thighs with forked tongues,
Recounting all the sailors it had won,
Yet still he walked, a man become a myth,
Into the jaws where daylight drowns and twists.

Last, he saw (or did the deep deceive?)
Two children dancing on a deck’s false eve—
Himself, all knees and sunburned arrogance,
And Eleanor, whose death he’d sailed to cleanse.
The ribbon slipped from fingers blue as lore,
A scarlet eel that fled toward the floor,
While fathoms above, the gulls resumed their cries
O’er waves that mend themselves, and lives, and lies.

Now lobsters pick through bones that softly pray
In cathedrals where the anglerfish hold sway,
And somewhere, in a cottage scabbed with moss,
A sister’s ghost still waits at windows crossed—
Her breath a fog that etches on the pane
The shape of ships that never came again.