The Mariner’s Lament: A Tideswept Requiem

The sea, a ravening titan, gnaws the cliffs,
Its maw agape with tongues of liquid night,
While gulls—like ash—ascend the screaming air
To pierce the clouds where memory’s compass fails.
He treads the shingle,每一步 a dirge unsung,
His footprints filled with whispers of the drowned.

Three hundred years have hung their rusted chains
Upon his throat, where salt and sorrow mate.
The ocean’s ledger, vast and pitiless,
Still tallies every gasp his lungs forgot
When keels split wide beneath Poseidon’s laugh.
Yet greater than the weight of sunken gold
Is what he guards within his ribcage’s vault:
A secret coiled like serpents in the deep,
A truth that drowned before it breached the light.

*Once, he loved.*

(Oh, scour that phrase with fire!
Let waves devour the weakness in the word.)
Her name was etched in tides now turned to myth—
A siren’s call he followed to the rocks.
They pledged their hearts where jasmine perfumed dusk,
Beneath an oak that sang in summer’s tongue.
But hubris, that old sailor’s addiction,
Whispered of glory in the typhoon’s grin.
He left her weeping on the vow-splashed shore,
Her silhouette a crack in dawn’s red throat.

The sea, that fickle bride, embraced his hull
With claws of aquamarine, her kiss a storm.
Masts snapped like bones in a leviathan’s jaw,
And men—mere playthings for the depths’ delight—
Were threaded through with coral’s cruel embroidery.
Alone, he clung to splinters and her ghost,
While fathoms chanted dirges in his ears:
*“All love is driftwood in the end.”*

But lo!
The curse was not the dying—that brief sting—
But this: to walk the margin where worlds blur,
To see, each night, her phantom on the waves,
Stretching her arms in smoke and moonlit ache,
Her voice the hiss of retreating foam.
*“You promised,”* weep the stars, *“You swore the shore.”*
Yet bound by chains of pride’s metallic rust,
He let the decades drown her twilight calls,
Believing time a salve, the sea his shrine.

Last night, when comets tore the sky’s black veil,
A figure emerged from the thunder’s raw throat—
Not her, but some sea-witch with eyes of wrecks,
Her hair a net of eels and shattered prows.
*“Fool!”* spat the hag, her laughter barnacle-sharp,
*“You think your penance paid in salted years?
She waits, not in the grave’s embrace, but here—
A soul trapped in my kelp-bound prison yard,
For your desertion forged her second death.
Each hour you wandered, blind to mercy’s shore,
Her essence frayed in agony’s tight loom.
Tonight, the final thread snaps. Seek the cave
Where blind crustaceans gnaw time’s crippled spine—
There lies the proof of what your fear has wrought.”*

Through maelstroms ripe with hydras’ spiraled fangs,
Past caves where shadows congeal into law,
He crawled, a crab stripped of its carapace,
To find the grotto where the sea’s heart beats.
And there, encased in amber’s golden cough—
A locket, cheap and tarnished, yet divine,
Within, two faces: his and hers, entwined.
Her portrait whispered through the glass’s sweat:
*“I bore your child, who never knew the sun.
The waves took both the night you chose the storm.”*

Now, back beneath the cliff’s accusing brow,
He howls a hymn to make the whirlpools pause.
The locket burns, a sun against his palm,
As from the waves, two phantoms now ascend—
A woman crowned with shells of milk and woe,
A child whose eyes are wounds in the firmament.
They drift toward him, not in rage, but grief,
Their forms dissolving at the touch of air.

*“Forgive—”* he starts, but tides devour the plea.
The child’s hand fades through his like mist through nets.
Three centuries too late, the secret’s bloom
Unfurls its petals in the hurricane’s breath—
A love outlived by guilt’s eternal scream.

The dawn, that callous surgeon, stitches light
Across the bay where now three spirits wail.
The sea, appeased, withdraws its frothing tongues,
Leaving the shore to gulls and emptiness.
Some say, when winter’s tempest bares its fangs,
A triad of shadows dance on the wave’s crest—
A man, a woman, and the ghost of ghosts,
Chasing the horizon’s ever-retreating smile,
Bound in a requiem no tide can cleanse.

Thus ends the mariner’s ledgered agony:
That truth, unearthed, may curse more than a lie,
And love, deferred, becomes the sea’s salt sting—
Eternal, hungry, vast in its despair.