A Lighthouse Reverie

What lighthouse at the strange embankment waits
O’er history’s journal in the rocks?
Where tempered men of age employ their stiffened gaits
And ne’er the safety of a galleon knocks?

Two houses of our Gaia mightily secured
The threshold of bitter sands and shell;
Carcass of an undead creature, lured
By all the matters of fair Nature’s belle.

For out upon the sickened sea of storms
Come much the children of the land adore:
Cockles, rings, and treasures vast it forms
No one delight, no foreign-named eyesore.

And he that counts a crew of meager feast
Does not that tale of Scylla and the waves relate;
But o’er the brandished fire burns at least,
And adage here, or anecdote at most expatiate.

Yet when by moon, the moonshine claims its last
(Fathers, mothers, husbands, wives retire),
Left only is the president of seas at mast,
To count the rings of smokelets rising higher.

And when this brand of man has seen his awe take face,
Then takes he to the lighthouse pier in blissful morn,
Where thereupon the door he knocks with grace
And, tea in hand, forgets the waking horn.

Ah! Sweet creatures of the dew and day!
What occupations to me matter not,
But that thou seest how pitiful a way
My heart, my soul, my kingdom this man sought.

For I am blessed, much right endowed
To end the eyelessness of fellow man,
I took upon that rock in early morn, and vowed:
“By my life’s end, I will conscript God’s man again.”

But what of toils, where one man spends his year?
About the dream of brandished fires and wine,
Where little else but death the evil clears
Of Gaia’s creviced hills and disconcerted pine?

Death was my beginning, afore that rite of play
For promises in youth are vain, and never done so well
As those resigned to subtly in every way;
That know the catch of promise is to sell.

Yet knew I much at two and twenty,
When lovers are the make of much in dream?
But we are children then appeased with toys aplenty,
No cocksure thing, but reverie in form we seem.

It is that man when jutting rocks are lost in tide of light,
That by the hearth of that gray home of lighthouse sits,
Disturbs no morning ritual, no creature in his sight,
And sets in quiet composition, to hear what aged man admits.

For by my eyes (though man is eyeless, I assure!)
No better way hath man born seconds out of years,
And centuries which tales of minutes oft endure,
Than by this mix of man and man, where both will end in tears.