The Tempest of Unspoken Tides

The sea, a rabid hound, howls forth its wrath,
Its frothing jowls devouring every path.
He grips the rail, salt-scarred and splintered wood,
And stares into the vortex where he stood—
Not here, not now, but in some foreign field
Where poppies choked on cannon smoke, congealed.
Her face returns—not name, nor form, nor kiss—
A ghost of warmth amidst the abyss.

*Memory*: A locket, cold, against his chest,
Her portrait veiled in dusk, a half-confessed
Desire. They spoke in glances, never words—
Two moths encircling a flame deferred.
The night before the march, beneath the yew,
She pressed the trinket where his heartbeat grew.
“Return,” she breathed—a vow, not a request—
And turned to mist before he guessed the rest.

Now thunder groans, a dirge for drowned men’s bones,
The ship convulses, timbers utter moans.
He stumbles, helmward, where the captain’s cry
Is strangled by the tempest’s jagged sigh.
“Due west!” he roars, though west is but a myth—
A siren’s lie the compass whispers with.
The soldier’s hands, once steady, now betray
The tremors of a soul in disarray.

A wave, black-maned and towering, descends—
The deck dissolves, the world’s axis bends.
He clings to rope, to hope, to splintered mast,
While in his chest, the locket holds him fast.
*Saltwater stings his wounds, both old and new,
And in the brine, her voice seems to seep through:*
“What storms are these that bind you to the deep?
What battles linger once the world’s asleep?”

Hours? Days? Time drowns where light dare not probe.
The gale’s a lash, the sea a starving globe.
A shape emerges—rock, or beast, or dream?
A jagged coast where seagulls scream and teem.
The captain’s grin, a rictus of despair:
“The Isle of Wrecks! No soul has breathed its air
And lived to whisper of its cursed embrace—”
The hull collides. The world is splintered grace.

He wakes in shards—sand sharp as broken vows,
A beach of teeth, the sky a vulture’s brows.
The locket, cracked, reveals her fading face—
A smear of paint, a breath of vanished grace.
He crawls, a wounded thing, toward the trees
That twist like accusations in the breeze.
Their leaves hiss dirges, stories of the lost,
Of loves become the ocean’s nameless cost.

Deep in the thicket, shadows coil and bloom,
A cottage rots, consumed by moss and gloom.
Its door, ajar, exhales a decade’s dust—
Within, a hearth where embers choke on rust.
And there—oh, there—her specter sits, composed,
Still stitching time with threads of deeds foreclosed.
She turns. Her eyes are hollows, yet they see
The man he was, the ghost he came to be.

“You lingered late,” she murmurs, voice a thread,
“The war is done, yet still you march, undead.
I waited, till the cliffs grew tired of tears,
Till all your letters drowned in silent years.”
He reaches, but his fingers cleave the air—
She shivers like a flame, then is not there.
The walls collapse. The floorboards yawn, reveal
A sea that churns where roots once sought to heal.

He flees, the island crumbling at his heel,
Back to the shore where reality may kneel.
The ship’s carcass, a skeleton half-swallowed,
Groans as the tide, insatiate, turns hollowed.
A raft of debris—promise frail as breath—
He launches into waves that smell of death.

*The ocean drinks his prayers, his rage, his blame,*
As currents clutch and claim him, flesh and name.
The locket sinks, a whisper in the deep,
Where all unchosen loves lie bound to sleep.
Above, the gulls still wheel, their cries a knell—
“What mourns is not the dying, but the *fell*.”

And on some distant shore, a woman old
Still scans the horizon, though her hands are cold.
She knows, as sun dips into liquid night,
No tide returns what darkness claims by right.
The storm, appeased, withdraws its jagged wings—
The sea, the soldier, and the heart are things
That memory, like waves, will smooth, erode…
While love, unspoken, swells, then sinks, bestowed.