The Mariner's Candor | Teen Ink

The Mariner's Candor

September 19, 2014
By RohanKhan SILVER, Plano, Texas
RohanKhan SILVER, Plano, Texas
6 articles 2 photos 4 comments

Sails once a fully luff with whips as upward smoke,
Now swoon languid and weary.
As his Ketch in sight of the Delos dale
Proudly hankered to distend its sail,
To steadfast cleave the winnowing lawns
Chasing draft to shoal until morn pressed through dawn.
Inquiring upon the faintest shell
Caught starboard before the wallowing flush.
Discerning cloud scuds with tireless glut.
Viewing a wholly world sunset-blush, 
Upon slumberous sways that paused then gently fell.
And even gentler does the wind abut,
And stilling is the salty smell.

For he who found divinity in trees,
Saw life in dull stones and felt breath in air.
And he who harked the humdrum of bourgeois bees,
Chasing behind their pollen-pursuits,
For long and laden stigma droops,
Stooped low and let the dew-sticky soil cup his knees.
And counted bespeckled spots of floating seeds,
With half-glances to the started sapphire sky.

Barefooted and bold the boy
Who walked with his head at rest
Cradled upon the crook of his wrist
Swayed by the gales abreast.
Trotting past the house and by a street
Through the mud and pining laurel-shrub
On through to sands of sneezing bud,
Until he found solitude soft enough
To cross the arches of his calloused feet,
And strike a gaze in clear relief
Upon a settling of the saffron sky,
And listen to a mounting tempo accrete
Catching glints of shell beneath his eye
As the salty froth sifted through his sandy seat.
And through the waves the sailing Petrels fly.

The steaming tides whisper symphonies sweet.
As warped wood attunes its aged creak,
A mellower sigh then floating leafs of Autumn’s day
Ascends his breast to lead his mind astray.
Eyes half-shut unto basking stars,
Fingers twill woven and cradling his head
Swayed by the billow of Brizo’s breathe.
To awake his dream is to lay with death
And no longer hearken the lulling sea’s sluggish bars.
A wanderer stalls and floats by in calm, not in dread,
With a broken compass and a star-stroked bed,
And plates of pickled fish with biscuit bread.
For the mariner’s spyglass sees delirious and bleary,
And his ardor too cloying to evoke.


The author's comments:

I was held in Timberlawn for a near month last winter, i had managed to sneak a pencil and some scraps of paper into my room during my stay. This is the first of three poems i wrote during my hospitalization. I tell myself the life that i have delineated is the life i hanker for, although the reality of the Mariner and my own charater are physically dissimilar, our thought process and ambition concur. I often would muse over such the life, my reveirs during my hospitalization were of a life at sea, a life in air, and a life in the earth, without any feasible toil or hardship. I wanted to be anything but what i was then. I consider this peice an expression of my craving for honoest freedom and the candor of it's practice. 


Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.