The Mariner’s Lament: A Voyage into Shadow
A vessel, gaunt and worn, doth cleave the frothy spine
Of waves that rise like specters, howling through the night,
While on its splintered deck, a soul confronts his plight.
The mariner, named Elias, gnarled by time’s cruel hand,
Stares deep into the abyss, where neither sea nor land
Offers solace to his spirit, lost in endless blue.
His eyes, twin pools of sorrow, mirror skies askew,
And in their depths, the ghosts of yesteryears reside—
A wife’s soft voice, a child’s laugh, love he’s been denied.
The rain, unyielding siren, drums the mast’s lament,
Each drop a needle piercing cloth and sentiment.
His fingers clutch a locket, cold against his breast,
Wherein a fading portrait shows what he loved best:
A woman, fair as dawn, with eyes like twilight’s gleam,
Now swallowed by the fathoms of a dreamer’s dream.
“Oh, Clara,” whispers Elias, voice adrift in gale,
“Why did the fates decree that love itself should fail?
I sought the horizon’s promise, wealth to grace thy brow,
Yet here I drown in shadows, cursed to disavow
The warmth of hearth, the tender touch I cast aside—
A fool who bartered gold for love, and watched it die.”
But lo! Through veils of torrents, phantoms take their shape:
A figure cloaked in mist, with visage like a drape
Of moonlit pallor, glides across the ship’s forlorn prow.
Her hair, a stream of silver, crowns her ethereal brow,
And in her wake, the tempest hushes, breathless, still—
A calm that chills the marrow, bends the sailor’s will.
“Elias,” speaks the wraith, her tone a dirge’s sigh,
“The tides of time are merciless; they rot, they rend, they pry.
Thou sought the world’s far corners, blind to love’s true weight,
And now, the ocean’s ledger claims thee as its mate.
Thy Clara waits no longer in the realm of breath—
She slumbers ‘neath the cypress, wedded unto death.”
The mariner reels, his heart a storm-tossed stone,
For in the specter’s words, he hears his truth made known.
“Then why,” he cries, “does memory torment me so?
Why carve her face in starlight, where’er these currents flow?
If all I loved is ashes, let the waves decree
My bones be ground to coral, lost to memory!”
The phantom lifts a hand, its pallor kissed with rue,
“Thy penance is to wander, endless, unsubdued,
To tread the vast and voiceless halls where hope is drowned,
Where echoes of thy failures haunt each hollow sound.
The locket’s gleam shall fade, as all mortal things must,
And thou, a nameless whisper in the sea’s blind dust.”
As silence cloaks the vessel, Elias grasps the air—
The specter melts to vapor, leaving but despair.
The locket, once a beacon, crumbles in his grip,
Its portrait drowned in darkness, like a sinking ship.
The rain resumes its chorus, fiercer than before,
As waves, with jaws of onyx, crash against the shore
Of his resolve. He staggers, knees to planks now pressed,
And weeps for Clara’s fragrance, for the vows unblessed.
The helm, unmanned, surrenders to the squall’s command;
The ship, a brittle carcass, veers to no man’s land.
Days blend into nights, a tapestry of gray,
As hunger claws his belly, thirst saps strength away.
Yet still, the sea denies him death’s benign embrace—
A cruel jest, to linger in this loveless place.
He scribbles notes in journals, ink diluted by tears,
Accounts of hollow voyages, the sum of wasted years.
“To thee, who finds this chronicle,” he scrawls in haste,
“Beware the siren’s whisper, the heart’s unanchored waste.
For glory’s light is fleeting, a mirage on the waves,
And all that binds true meaning lies in those we brave
The storms for.” Here, his quill falters, fingers frail as glass,
As shadows creep like ivy through the ship’s cracked mass.
The final page lies barren, save a name—his own—
Etched thrice, as if to prove he once was flesh and bone.
A moonless night descends, the air a shroud of frost,
When Elias spies a glimmer on the waters, tempest-tossed.
A light, or so it seems—a lantern’s distant glow—
And toward it, his derelict is helplessly borne slow.
“Land!” he rasps, though reason knows this is a lie,
For in this liquid desert, no haven waits nearby.
Yet on the radiance drifts, a siren’s fleeting song,
And with it, Clara’s visage, fair, forgiving, strong.
He leaps into the blackness, arms outstretched in vain,
To clasp her spectral figure, free his soul of pain.
The ocean drinks his body, swift and without sound,
While high above, the heavens shed no tear, profound.
The ship, now but a relic, sinks beneath the swell,
Its tale untold, its chronicle a hollow shell.
And somewhere, in the depths where light dare not descend,
Elias treads the current, neither foe nor friend—
A wraith among the ruins of choices dearly sold,
Where love and longing merge into the dark, cold mold.
Thus ends the mariner’s voyage, not with cannon’s roar,
But in the silent fathoms, where all regrets implore
A second chance, denied by time’s unyielding stream.
Remember him, though nameless, adrift in this dream:
A cautionary fable, etched in salt and foam,
Of how the quest for glory left a heart without a home.
“`
