Wednesday, March 27, 2019

THE SKELETON COAST (Poem by Terry Dawson)

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THE SKELETON COAST

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Across the Uhab river’s dry bed

Lies a land unlike any other,

An arid plain beside the sea,

Of wild, mysterious beauty.

Land of majesty, wonder and awe

In pastels, seven colours of sand

That stir a man from within

To be his most and to strive ever for more.

And fog rolls in on chill, chill winds

From a cold, cold treacherous sea.

Beheld there incongruous things

Like ship, now skeletal wrecks,

Adrift on an ocean of sand

Mile upon mile from the shore.

White-bleached driftwood there

Castaways from far distant land.


And in the vastness of that wide space

Is thrust upon man his own tininess.

And there's a stillness and a silence

To calm a turbulent soul

And arranges things from within

That a tendency to violence,

Gives way to love of peace!

But stranger by far than all things,

In that strangest of wild, wild lands,

Is the companionship that is given

By desert solitude, to those that seek –

And the thus-comforted soul

Sings its songs in return

In that wilderness strange and unique.

 

Terry Dawson










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