Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,
Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabasters
And night blues.
Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving.
Fill your black hull
With white moonlight.
There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.
When the long day goes by
And I do not see your face,
The old wild, restless sorrow
Steals from its hiding place.
My day is barren and broken,
Bereft of light and song,
A sea beach bleak and windy
That moans the whole day long.
To the empty beach at ebb tide,
Bare with its rocks and scars,
Come back like the sea with singing,
And light of a million stars.
I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.
Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea--
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me.
Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowing
From the immense blue circle of the sea,
And the soft thunder where long waves whiten--
These were the same for Sappho as for me.
Two thousand years--much has gone by forever,
Change takes the gods and ships and speech of men--
But here on the beaches that time passes over
The heart aches now as then.
My Puritan Grandmother! — I see her now,
With placid brow,
Always so sure
"That no things but the right things shall endure !"
Sombrely neat, so orderly and prim,
Always a little grim.
Austere but kind. . . .
Smooth-banded hair and smoothly-banded mind.
But let me whisper it to you today —
I know it now —
That deep in her there was a flame at play.
Beneath that brow
The blue-grey eyes sought beauty, found it too
Most often by the ocean's passionate blue.
Her sea-beach treasures — shells and coloured weed
Gathered and hoarded with glad human greed —
I remember
The crackle of the palm trees
Over the mooned white roofs of the town...
The shining town...
And the tender fumbling of the surf
On the sulphur-yellow beaches
As we sat... a little apart... in the close-pressing night.
The moon hung above us like a golden mango,
And the moist air clung to our faces,
Warm and fragrant as the open mouth of a child
And we watched the out-flung sea
Rolling to the purple edge of the world,
Yet ever back upon itself...
As we...
Inadequate night...
And mooned white memory
With heavy doleful clamour, hour on hour, and day on day,
The muddy groundswell lifts and breaks and falls and slides away.
The cold and naked wind runs shivering over the sands,
Salt are its eyes, open its mouth, its brow wet, blue its hands.
It finds naught but a starving gull whose wings trail at its side,
And the dull battered wreckage, grey jetsam of the tide.
The lifeless chilly slaty sky with no blue hope is lit,
A rusty waddling steamer plants a smudge of smoke on it.
Stupidly stand the factory chimneys staring over all,
The grey grows ever denser, and soon the night will fall:
The wind runs sobbing over the beach and touches with its hands
The wind that drives the fine dry sand
Across the strand:
The sad wind spinning arabesques
With a wrinkled hand.
Labyrinths of shifting sand,
The dancing dunes!
I will arise and run with the sand,
And gather it greedily in my hand:
I will wriggle like a long yellow snake over the beaches.
I will lie curled up, sleeping,
And the wind shall chase me
Far inland.
My breath is the music of the mad wind;
Shrill piping, stamping of drunken feet,
The fluttering, tattered broidery flung
Over the dunes' steep escarpments.
On the paved parapet
you will step carefully
from amber stones to onyx
flecked with violet,
mingled with light,
half showing the sea-grass
and sea-sand underneath,
reflecting your white feet
and the gay strap crimson
as lily-buds of Arion,
and the gold that binds your feet.
You will pass
beneath the island disk
(and myrtle-wood,
the carved support of it)
and the white stretch
Like to islands in the seas,
Stand our personalities--
Islands where we always face
One another's watering place.
When we promenade our sands
We can hear each other's bands,
We can see on festal nights
Red and green and purple lights,
Gilt pavilions in a row,
Stucco houses built for show.
But our eyes can never reach
Further than the foolish beach,
Never can they hope to win
To the fastnesses within:
Rocks unsealed that watch the sky
And the tormented clouds go by;--
From out the dragging vastness of the sea,
Wave-fettered, bound in sinuous, seaweed strands,
He toils toward the rounding beach, and stands
One moment, white and dripping, silently,
Cut like a cameo in lazuli,
Then falls, betrayed by shifting shells, and lands
Prone in the jeering water, and his hands
Clutch for support where no support can be.
So up, and down, and forward, inch by inch,
He gains upon the shore, where poppies glow
And sandflies dance their little lives away.
The sucking waves retard, and tighter clinch
The weeds about him, but the land-winds blow,
And in the sky there blooms the sun of May.
An arid daylight shines along the beach
Dried to a grey monotony of tone,
And stranded jelly-fish melt soft upon
The sun-baked pebbles, far beyond their reach
Sparkles a wet, reviving sea. Here bleach
The skeletons of fishes, every bone
Polished and stark, like traceries of stone,
The joints and knuckles hardened each to each.
And they are dead while waiting for the sea,
The moon-pursuing sea, to come again.
Their hearts are blown away on the hot breeze.
Only the shells and stones can wait to be
Washed bright. For living things, who suffer pain,
May not endure till time can bring them ease.