Concerto for Mind, Heart and Ocean

I Overture

Listen, as the marine composes

a symphony of rhymes

and recites to all who promise

to know themselves in time.

Memories of many tides and lives

go to make the ocean’s swell.

That’s why it’s here that you know them all

and you learn of Nature’s spell.

Shimmering, swirling, the surf

betrays the ocean’s words.

Shifting, washing, the sand

echoes the thoughts of bards.

Wait a while, consider,

a man is waiting there,

cloaked against the tempest

gained from another’s stare.

II A man by the sea

Lost on the shore, I have walked in the rain,

I have wondered just where I should be.

Dampening my skin, but cleansing far deeper,

Nature’s tears are fresh and free.

A flight of thoughts arrives, alighting

on the edge, in disappearing shallows.

A hundred cocked-eye glances – I’m not alone

here at the edge, a wandering shadow.

III An urban man goes home

Where weeping witness measures

the strength of a man’s walk

he casts a shadow on the pages

that open when they talk.

To chance upon an evening

when homefires make him proud

and, lost among the strangers,

a castle on a cloud.

The child that weeps for Christmas,

for winter’s frosted toys,

is him in frozen time again

like every girl and boy.

To see a man pay homage,

his thank yous and his pleas,

are lost amid the whispering

- the tongues are in the trees.

He listens at the water,

his second home away.

Can’t see it in the city, you know,

the laws that make it day.

IV Upon the tide

Pearl fishermen have been here

and lost themselves amongst

the shadows of the one that ties them

away.

Unsighted am I, as they,

from the heart of the oceans

unfolding before the storm’s crusade

on land.

And yet, I am beholding

the sea’s child dancer as

she plays upon her chancing eyes

and dreams.

So, what becomes the fisherman

whose life is on the tide

and, cast amid the azure, must only

follow?

© Andrew Williams