Poem by Margaret Nairn

Photo by Bill Perrault



Bedeviled

Glory, Halleluiah!
We are alone in a country
Surrounded by water, that retrieves
The lost of others’ lands.
Tell me, at the hands of the
Natives, why do we expect Utopia,
And not the hounding crash
An understanding wish would make it?
Overborne, They’ve yearned, then learned
‘Till we have learned to yearn for
Something left behind. It is the
Sound of waves crashing
On the sand upon the shore,
The lore of physics—or the wind, but nothing more
That brings us to ourselves:
The physical “Stop and Go”
Of continents drifting, currents calling
And all moving apart or together
Beyond what we know, but what
We knew before.