The Mariner’s Lament: A Ballad of Salt and Shadows
Where tempests weave their silvered spite,
An ancient mariner treads the frayed hem of days,
His boots gnawed by the cliff’s teeth, white
As bones of leviathans sunk in frothing graves.
The sea, a rabid hound, howls and heaves—
Its spittle stings his cheeks, brine-etched and grim,
While memory’s gale tears through the sieve
Of years, unspooling threads of visions dim:
A schooner’s ghost, its sails like lovers’ sleeves.
He hears them still—the creak of timbered vows,
The rigging’s hum, a chorus drowned too soon,
The captain’s laugh (now food for coral crowds),
The mate’s rough ballad to a waning moon.
But loudest screams the silence Time allows—
A widow’s shriek where once a hearth glowed warm,
Her face half-formed in fog, her name erased
By decades’ theft. The cliffs, like judges, swarm
To hurl his guilt anew in waves disgraced:
“*You left her weeping on that fractured shore.*”
Three times the tide withdraws its skeletal hand,
Three times returns to clutch his shadowed feet.
The wind, a sybil, rasps through salt and sand:
“*What fool would court the deep’s deceit?
No compass points to ports where yesterlands stand.*”
Yet in his chest, a rogue wave swells and breaks—
Not blood, but kelp and vengeance, black and thick.
He stares where horizon’s blade the water slakes,
And lo! Through storm’s grim raiment, phantom-quick,
*The Aurelia* ascends—his lost command.
Her figurehead, a siren wept to wood,
Still sings the tune that lured him from his bride.
Her planks, though barnacled, await his blood
To seal their pact. The mariner, hollow-eyed,
Clambers down crags where gulls scream widowhood.
The surf’s cold fingers clutch his shivering frame,
As on the prow he carves her epitaph—
Not letters, but the scars no soul can name:
A boy’s last kiss, a ring cast off in wrath,
A life curdled to brine, both fuel and flame.
The ship, a coffin dressed in sailcloth, leans
Into the storm’s jagged embrace. No chart
Guides through this strait where every crest convenes
To judge the trespasser. The heavens part—
Lightning unstitches night, reveals what wrath means.
Mast snapped like promises he once bestowed,
The deck, a chessboard where the furies play,
And in the crow’s nest, perched where no man strode,
A cormorant with eyes of judgment-day
Shrieks tales of wrecks no mercy ever sowed.
He grips the wheel (its spokes like ribs exposed)
And laughs—a sound that chills the squall’s dark heart.
“*Come, old accomplice! Let our feud be closed—
You took my crew, my love, my counterpart…
Now claim the husk your hunger never proposed.*”
The ocean, cheated of his younger pain,
Roars up in green-black towers, crowned with spray.
The mariner, salt-crusted, feels the chain
Of hours snap. The ship, in one last display,
Dives bow-first into Time’s insatiable vein.
Down, down through cathedral depths where sunlight drowns,
Past eels that coil like lost regrets in wait,
Through forests of dead masts and sailors’ crowns,
He sinks, a relic of unyielding fate.
The pressure sings of tombs and seaweed gowns.
There, on the silted bed of all his wrongs,
He sees them—phantom crewmen, barnacle-skinned,
Their mouths agape in coral-riddled songs,
Their fingers pointing where two shadows twinned:
Himself, young, kneeling; her, with hair unbound.
She floats—not corpse, nor memory, but both—
Her wedding shift a shroud of seafoam lace.
No rot can touch the fury in her growth,
Nor years dim the accusation in her face.
Her voice, a riptide, pulls him from his wroth:
“*You chose the mistress whose kiss never warms,
Who beds a thousand men yet claims no vows.
My tears became the tempest, my lonely storms
The anchors dragging you to these sea-slung halls.
Here, love’s betrayed become the ocean’s terms.*”
The mariner’s lungs, like sails deprived of wind,
Collapse. His eyes, twin ships gone dim with rust,
Drink final visions: her hand, outreached, thinned
To sea-wrack… then the darkness, cold and just.
Above, the world forgets what waves have thieved.
Dawn licks the cliffs with tongues of pallid gold.
A single boot lies tangled in the kelp,
While gulls debate what tragedies they’ve sold.
Far out, a whirlpool stirs—some say it’s help
The sea provides to cleanse the stories told.
But in the town where chimney-smoke still curls
Like questions posed by those who stay behind,
An old wife tends her fire, mutters of pearls
That whisper in the night. The villagers find
No body to inter. The tempest swirls
In teacups now, a legend sip by sip—
How pride and brine conspire to claim their fee,
How love, once moored, may yet let anchor slip,
And how the heart’s first treachery will be
The tide that drowns all ports on memory’s map.
The sea, relentless scribe, etches its tale
In froth that dies the moment it is born.
The mariner’s name fades from the coastal wail,
His sin dissolved to salt, his anguish worn
To pebbles in the surf’s eternal grail.
Yet sometimes, when the nor’easter claws the dunes,
And windows rattle with the ocean’s dirge,
They say two phantoms dance beneath the moon—
A youth and lass, their voices merged
In vows the waves devour, note by tune.
Thus ends the ballad sung in ports afar:
Trust not the siren-song of yesterday,
For though it gleams like lighthouse ’neath the star,
Its beam reveals the rocks, not sheltered bay.
The past’s a riptide—sweetest kiss, most mortal scar.
