The Tempest’s Epistle: A Ballad of the Unquiet Tide

Three centuries prior, when the cliffs wore younger scars,
A schooner, *The Marrow’s Resolve*, set sail,
Its hull a hymn to oak, its mast kissed by stars,
Its captain—one Elias Thorn—pale
As the gale’s first whisper, yet firm in his charting,
For in his breast pocket, wax-sealed and dire,
Lay a letter inked with vows of departing,
To a love left ashored by the Dover’s pyre.

*”Dearest Eleanor,”* it began, in script like veins,
*”The tide, that old betrayer, claims my hand,
But mark this oath—when the horizon wanes,
I’ll return, or send word from some far strand.
Should Neptune claim me, look to the kelp’s dark cursive,
Where the waves write my anguish, endless, rehearsive.”*

But the sea, that fickle scribe, smothered the script,
Drowned the ship in its inkwell of disdain,
And Elias, in the brine’s cold crypt,
Became a note in the storm’s mad refrain.
Yet his soul, unmoored from the flesh’s tether,
Could not dissolve into the silent deep,
For the letter, clutched in hands of spectral leather,
Lay trapped in the ribs where eels now sleep.

Years unspooled. On the cliffs, Eleanor paced,
Her eyes two lighthouses scouring the gray,
Till her bones grew as cliffs, her hope displaced
To the gulls’ bleak ballads at break of day.
She died with the sea’s name coiled on her tongue,
And the village, in pity, carved her a stone,
But the wind, ever cruel, the epitaph unsung,
Left her grave to the thistle’s thorny moan.

Now, the specter of Elias treads the swell,
His form but a ripple where moonlight strains,
Seeking the shore where her footsteps fell,
And the letter no current may purge from his veins.
Each night, he wails through the breakers’ roar,
A sirenless dirge for the vow he keeps,
While the sea, in its malice, guards the floor
Where the ship’s splintered heart in darkness sleeps.

***

In the now—a boy, Finn, with sand in his tread,
Finds a bottle, glass warped by the ocean’s breath,
Its neck choked with kelp, its message long dead,
Or so it seemed, till he glimpsed the script beneath.
Not a cork, but a fingerbone wedged in the throat,
And inside, salt-curled, a page sallow as pain,
The ink bleached to ghosts of the words Elias wrote,
Yet the boy, by some sorcery, deciphered the strain.

*”Eleanor—hear me through the water’s veil:
I am not lost, though the squall’s fist fell,
Nor dead, though my lungs fill with the whale’s dark tale.
I am here, where the drowned chant their carousel,
A scribe to the abyss, each wave a new stanza,
Each crash of the surf, a missed chance to reach thee.
Forgive the tides’ treason, their relentless answer—
I am bound, love, until this letter finds sea.”*

The boy reads aloud, his voice a frail raft,
And the air grows dense with the tang of lament.
The sea, as if scalded, recoils fore and aft,
And the moon sheathes her light, in dread silent.
Then—a shape from the foam, a man not a man,
Elias, his eyes voids where starfish cling,
His voice the grind of a hull on sand,
*”You’ve opened the wound where the ocean sings.*

*Give her the page, boy—the cliff where she sleeps,
Press the words to her stone, let the ink be her tears.
Only then may the chains in the deeps unkeep,
And my soul find the port of unhaunted years.”*
Finn, trembling, obeys, climbs the path grass has sutured,
Where Eleanor’s grave drinks the rain’s slow poison,
And there, as the gales howl their futures fractured,
He lays the drowned letter—her name its lone bruise.

***

A shuddering sigh cleaves the night’s black core,
The sea stills its fangs, the clouds part like veils,
And two shadows ascend from the ocean’s sore—
Elias and Eleanor, twin to the gales.
Their hands clasp in light no mortal can hold,
A reunion etched in the tempest’s breath,
But the boy, watching, feels his blood grow old,
For their love is a language that speaks only death.

The dawn breaks, a wound of gold on the waves,
The ghosts fade to mist, to myth, to the air,
And Finn stands alone where the cliff engraves
Its elegy into earth. The village declares
Him mad, for who else would converse with the storm,
Or hear in the tide’s roar a lover’s cry?
Yet deep in his bones, a chill takes form—
A kinship with those who in longing die.

Years later, when Finn, now gaunt as a gull,
Succumbs to the cough the sea air imbues,
They bury him where the cliff’s teeth lull,
His epitaph brief, his name kissed by dews.
But some claim, when the hurricane bares its throat,
Two voices entwine with a third, frail and clear,
A trio of spirits in the tempest’s note,
Bound by a letter, the sea’s austere seer.

Thus ends the tale—of how love outlives the flesh,
Yet poisons the pulse of the living breast,
How the ocean, that keeper of vows enmeshed,
Makes eternity’s ache but a thief’s bequest.
And still, when the gale writes its wrath on the foam,
The ink swirls in patterns the drowned adore—
A name, a plea, a heart’s shattered poem,
And the shore, ever-listening, weeps as before.