The Lighthouse's Song

 

Long, dark nights are favoured to me

For staring out upon my sea,

With cyclopsed eye

I scan sapphire tarred waves,

Spying for nightmares and drownings.

 

Hark upon the white horses!

How they battle and gnash,

Duelling and crashing,

Smashing on jagged, crustacean jewelled rocks,

Hissing their death knell

Across sand’s spiteful scratch,

grasping at life with arching claws.

 

Oh, how I savour their delicious foaming,

Their glorious plumed fire,

Their spitting upon Neptune’s graveyard,

His hideous skeletoned playground.

 

I saved a few from a watery death

It’s true, I had my day

But now abandoned

I can only watch as nature makes her play.

 

My lichened bricks groan,

Weighted down by a coat of unwanted green shimmer,

Paintwork long peeled and blown to the skies,

Colours stripped back to the bare and the grim.

 

Yet still I reach for the distant wail

of the mermaids call,

The siren’s song

Round algaed rocks,

‘Come to me,

lie with me, upon my salty rippled deathbed.’

 

And I, long alone,

stretch out to catch the whistle of the wind,

To cup the spite of the storm,

For cloying summer sunshine is no joy to me

Boredom lies deep with a calm, ripple free sea.

 

Gone are the men who once weathered with me

Their footfalls signed upon my broken stairs,

Long dead lonely folk, silenced,

save for their legacy,  

the ghostly creaks of forgotten hands.

 

I hear the whispered echoes of

Sharp calls through the ink to hapless wrecks,

When I shone my light,

Golden and bright

To cast away shadows from rocks in the night.

 

Yet I am not saddened

For this long dark night

Is favoured to me

As I work on alone,

Treasuring my wondrous sea.