to the genius of Ban 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 fragments scatter across the docks:
metal, mist, and murmurs of forgotten ships.
The cry returns, bending around corners of night,
a lonelier echo than silence itself,
marking time where no one keeps it.
______________________________________
It spoke to me first in youth,
low and patient,
a voice stretched across water:
Not yet. Not there. Be wary.
Sometimes I listened.
The fog thinned, the path was clear,
and I walked on with dry feet.
Other times, I turned away,
chose the fire of my own will.
Storms followed -
yet even wreckage has its glimmer:
I found pearls in the broken timbers,
salt in my wounds that taught me
how to taste sweetness again.
The foghorn has 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
to remind me of distance,
to remind me of return.
And so my life is a coastline,
shaped as much by listening
as by defiance.
Each echo I followed,
each echo I ignored,
has carved its richness:
the harbor, the open sea,
the hidden shoals,
the wide horizon still waiting.
GBS
1992
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