She wept on the Shore

She sat with her back to the sea, weeping,
Pale pearls of tears into her palms,
As the black wracks of her raven hair,
Were knotted by salty fingers of the wind,
And fell across her face, as shadows on the sun.


No one seemed to see her there but me,
Each stranger on the shore who passed her by,
Stared straight through, as though unseen,
As sunlight seeps through clear glass,
And comets slip into the catacomb of night.


Then on a clot of cockleshells, tide lapped,
Around a palisade by circuits of the moon,
I saw a wilted wreath of rose’s red,
Bound with a black bow, and then left,
Beside a slash of sand where the waves ride.


I knelt to read the water stained words,
Which had bled blue into a blur of goodbye,
A lover as lost as she, becalmed in sorrow,
Had written the lines, asking himself why ?
She had drowned all their dreams beneath the tide.


I looked back to where she had been sitting,
And saw that she had in silence fled,
From that promontory, still pristine,
Yet had left no footsteps upon the sands,
Now wet with waves, foaming white and wild.


Then staring out to sea I saw a shadow,
Trapped in the limbo between waves and sun,
Poised trembling upon the cusp of infinity,
Until a rainbow stretched forth its bridge,
And gathered up her ghost into god’s grace.