to the genius of Van Morrison
ooooo… ooooo… ooooo… it drifts through fog,
stumbling over timbers, over water’s thin mirror.
A pulse, a bruise, a shadow pressed to the pier.
No hand reaches, no ear answers -
only the hollow recoil of air and memory.
It slips between the waves,
a voice neither here nor there,
then shatters across the docks:
metal, mist, murmurs of ships unmoored.
The cry bends around the corners of night,
lonelier than silence itself,
marking time where none is kept.
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It spoke to me first in youth -
low and patient,
stretched across water:
“Not yet… wait… beware.”
Sometimes I listened,
the fog thinned, the path clear,
and I walked on with dry feet.
Other times, I turned away,
chose the fire of my own will.
Storms followed -
wreckage strewn like lessons,
yet even broken things have glimmer:
pearls hidden in timbers,
salt in wounds that taught me
to taste sweetness again.
The foghorn never ceased.
Not a tyrant, not a father,
but a presence -
half warning, half witness.
It does not judge the ship
that sails too far into darkness.
It only sings,
that long, aching note
reminding me of distance,
reminding me of return.
And so my life became a coastline,
shaped as much by listening
as by defiance.
Each echo I followed, each echo I ignored,
carved its own richness:
the harbor, the open sea,
the hidden shoals,
and a horizon that still waits,
luminous and unclaimed,
like a song not yet sung.
GBS
1992
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