When Daylight Comes

    When daylight comes
    you roam the crinkled shores
    stride out to a beckoning emptiness.
    Wednesday’s sun flares up
    from the crook of grey hills.
    Your footprints weave
    the virgin wastes like an aimless drunk,
    beetle across this wilderness of rumpled dunes.
    The sands are a map
    and last night’s other lives
    have left their feeble tracks and tiny stories:
    claw prints of a bittern
    soft paws, a rabbit under moonlight,
    stitch marks of a swift predator–
    millipede, night hunter on the prowl–
    the strutting bold stride of a pheasant.
    And here a tiny death–
    last nocturne of a beetle
    a black eight-oared boat toiling
    the mineral heaving dunes
    it's final furrowed wake in a
    moonscape’s wrinkled swells
    till shipwrecked here,
    speared by a beak at dawn.
    Sunrise scatters golden light.
    Frail thing of flesh, you lift
    stick arms in supplication
    captive to a sky of cirrus charms
    eyes raised up
    to it’s tousled random beauty.
    Might some grace yet come?
    Subdued by sea mists
    the dawn sun stares,
    a tamed red Gorgon’s eye.
    You come here sometimes
    comforted by seas that measure time.

       – Jogyata.