A sun-burnt woman
drifts along the restless shoreline,
Clad in salt-stained silk,
a sweet peach pressed to her lips:
The wind blows and the woman counts the waves in quiet devotion,
And now and then her tide-glazed gaze turns sharp…
Her thoughts drown in her decades of quiet contemplation!
She murmurs inwardly:
“I will hush the ocean’s breath,
As one stills a ripple
softly, almost tenderly!”
But the tide returns! She feels her strength unravel,
Ah! What name quivers, unspoken,
Against her sweetened mouth? What merciless longing grips her?
No soul shall decipher it.
The fruitless vision dims.
She remembers a shadowed confidante, perhaps, veiled in long memory…
Watching the humid sweetness drift and vanish,
As on those twilight shores, from the fruit in her hand.