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~Life Within the Breakwall~

The break-walled harbor  

holds sea-locked lives

as dock lines stretch, then sag,

stretch, then sag

on the moon-sucked surge.

Mary tends her seaside bar, mends wounds,

dodges brawls.  She escorts

the drowned and found to their graves.

The drowned and lost

languor in her dreams.

Fuel-dock Harry

rolls out hose, tops-off tanks,

ices the holds. Corporate pockets

take the cash. Harry

shut it down one day

with a two-barrel blast in his shack.

Harbor master Jim, widowed

now, patrols the dusk-dim

moorings  a-bob in his wake

as complaints of gulls

land upon cormorants black as dread.

They dive, beak death

to minnows and silver needlefish.  

Buoy bells clong and clang

socked in a shawl of fog.

Beyond the breakwall there's a raft of kelp

with its crew of flies.

It shades a shale-boned reef

as I watch phosphorescent swells

pilfer the helpless shore,

and this humbles me at times,

as I walk the beach,

feel the sand,  

the mountain it had been,

pulled from beneath my feet

to lie forever beyond the light.  

D. B. Tompsett