There was once a weary traveller,

Who settled himself by the sea

To tell the fleeting waves and sky

How burdened his heart had been:

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'The world has been most cruel to me,

There can be no other way; than to cast my sorrows

to the open sea, where here they shall not follow

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'Most clever am I, most clever indeed

For none shall know of my misdeed

With my sorrow may leave my labour

And the beauty of all things free;

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'By cloak of night-shadow,

No man is as he seems

His soul is food for moonlight

To rob him of his dreams.'

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But of all great spirits

Whose ears and eyes are open

The great sea knows of much, much more

Than the traveller of his sorrow.

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'There are many sacred places, child

That are warm and moist and succulent

Like a white pepper dust and moss engrossed

Kingdom of things small and smaller still,

Like the peeling, charred bark of willows'

-

'Perhaps by the blanketed night alone

You seek the fall of stone on stone

A home of creepers green and emerald still

What defeated place that once stood proud

And now stands wise, with the wolf in chace.'

-

'Some seek a faraway paradise,

To a place where the shore is long

And cliff faces beckon your name

And yet, as the traveller may travel

He will reach the campfire of his silence'

-

As the dawn approached, the shadows vanished

And trees stood in place of every sorrow

To which the weary traveller had sent

-

Across the tumultuous sea

The traveller doth reflected,

'As the phoenix may rise from its watery grave

I seek to quench the fires that burn radiant

While ever so quietly, I pick dreams from this garden

Where here, in this uncharted place,

Trees bend their ears to the earth

And drop the fruit of dreams abundant, sweeter than all'.

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inspired by Horace Smith's 'Ozymandias'.