Magic and Stories

Daring the Waves | Metamorphosis (Transmutation) | Woman Who Thought She Could Fly | River Crossing | Swimming or Sinking | A Good Girl | The Dredger | Gifts | Explorer | Lion Tamer | The Moon So Large | Wedding Gift | Test Poem | Darven c code

River Crossing

How far away the waters of the estuary,
How long ago the nights we were together,
Journeying across those deep and lurking waters
On the late night ferry.

What times they were, when all of love seemed certain,
What nights we spent as to and fro we sailed,
Walking the boat from top to lower deck
Talking of stars and seas and lands unknown,
Why did I think it was a metaphor
For some long lasting passion?

Somehow I did, somewhere I lost the plot,
I surely did not know that all your talk
Of distant oceans we would sail together
Was only words, what you described to me
Of tropic seas and sometime making landfall
Was just your make-believe.

A myth for your delight, until another came
Who had not heard your dreams as I had done,
You told them to her new, watching her face,
As night on night of stars you once watched mine
The hurt was bad, the innocence of love
Destroyed. Instead, a carapace of doubt.

Now years have gone, I’ve lost the look of you,
I can’t recall the colour of your eyes,
Yet still I miss those trips across the river,
The lamps that gleamed upon the bow and port,
The downward looking into roiling seas,
The upward gazing at the glittering stars.

The splash and plash and lash of engines turning,
Shore lights receding to a distant haze,
The distances between us ever growing,
The surge and sway and wash of love fast ebbing
Sinking to some abyss too deep for sounding,
Beyond recovery.