The
Island at Dawn
by Harold Rhenisch
where trees are fog and gold is pounded
to hang from ears instead of laws and writes, alone,
to forget all books, all pride, as if the words could wake
as grass rising from the morning tide
and the smell of salt that comes with dawn could be
written down and remain in dream, where islands drown
and men crawl onto drying sand and gasp
and cry and trample flat salt hay and grass.
It can’t be done. Pride can’t turn back
the human need for stone that gives the body bone
or water, which rains within our limbs. Salmon spawn,
where we return with dawn to die, yet do not die,
though die we will when they won’t come back.
Tiny silver flashes flow down streams into the sea,
and men come crawling out and gasp and groan
and spew out salt, to see it cold for the first time:
the stony beach that they must claim to cross.
|