Rimini

For Elizabeth

 

I stand before the Adriatic sea,

Unwreathed of confidence in things to be,

Time’s wind-born song of spray and transient foam

With each wave’s death dies one more death in me.

 

Behind, the glories of eternal Rome;

Above, a blank morn’s achromatic dome;

Below, the ebb and flow of all my days,

A distant sail, a vagrant thought of home.

 

I stand, a rock beneath the bone-blanched haze;

Lost eons rustle sand beneath my gaze;

The salt-breeze asks where all my Aprils fled,

And where my hopes, and where my fleeting Mays.

 

I ponder paths abandoned, where they led,

The swell of life, the outflow of the dead

Who wait to waken where their grey stones lie,

And muse on what might stir a dreamless head.

 

The green sea groans a long and wistful sigh;

The chant of fishermen draws near, and I

Wait on for thee, the sun my sea would wed,

One day, beneath a resurrected sky.

 

 

© Joseph Charles MacKenzie. All rights reserved.