3.03.2007

Children Playing on Peyton's Wharf

How can you dance in such shadows
when the sounds of the dock are like screaming widows
who sit up all night staring at distant lights outside the harbour?


We are the children of the street light,
Who hear of foggy histories,
and know no other God
but He who strips us bare and blinking.


We are the children of empty wharves
swarmed only by the laughter of seagulls,
voices playing obliviously
to the creak, creak, creak of the crumbling wood.


We are the storm that finally rips
our Grandfathers from their graves
into the salt and wet -
the stages so much a part of them,
so little of us.