" Sea Mornings "
Morning, the silence is broken
by stray crickets and a late star
flickers in its solitude,
grey dunes undulate between sand grass,
as if it were the wave,
and the sea is almost an even earth.
The palm trees are mere shadows
against the dark and quiet mountain
where nothing moves for a moment,
until a man, with fishnets heavy
upon his back, surveys the horizon,
the still hour, the quiet wind, and waits.
Dreams do not come as they once had
here where the dull and shapeless time passes quietly,
there are broken fences,
rusted nails barely keep the planks together,
a sign hangs by a shred of rope,
announces summers long ago
There was a cottage for rent,
free linen change every morning,
and free fishing trips to friars’s rock.
Everything is old, the paint that cracks
on the porch of every house,
the roofs that weathered twenty eight annual storms,
the songs of the sea, the mountains, the sand,
are ancient and the hands that held the fishnets
and paddled the boats to sea are aged.
Even the silence and the lack of wind
is an old tale traded by youth
to the catch of a daily piecemeal life.
Mornings do not bring the colors of dawn,
only the grey drab of a grey sea,
the grey sand, under a grey sky,
the tattered banner lifeless
in the windless shore, but the old
man waits, looks upon the open sea
and wonders how the days have been
spanned by the latitudes and longitudes
of nets that crisscross a shallow curious morning.
© 2004 Marty Abuloc
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