The Mariner
The vibration singing through all my veins
is the beating of endless tropical rains,
a pulsation of far-off breakers breaking,
with every tendril of hair on my head
the cry of a gull.
I am eighty years dead,
having perished at sea in a howling squall
off the African cape when a monstrous swell
overtowered the deck and crushed me choking
into the brine.
Now I drift without end
through a strange latitude, a slackened soul
drawn by a distant memory of wind,
past feeling but hardly at peace, possessed
of a thirst that will admit no slaking,
of a restlessness that will not rest.
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