The Wanderer

It lies amid an agony of dunes,
Upon a cape
Beyond the reach
Of grief,
Shaken, when giant's feet march down the beach
To tidal drums beat on the barrier reef—
A haggard grave with sand-worn runes
That blur,
Blur to a ghostly shape,
The name of some forgotten mariner,
And then, as if the carver had been brief,
"Was born," they state,
"And died—" no date—
"He was a wanderer."

His ribald cross leans drunken to the storm;
The shifting sands
Disclose
Pathetic hands;
The freezing winds shroud
Or unclose
The withered form.
The wind keens through the grass
That's sparse as old men's hair,
With voice as thin
As overtones upon a violin,
Until white bones
That once played jail-bars to his heart
Lie bare.

And in the frozen blast dwarf-peas
Flaunt like a pack of motleys
'Round the spot,
Rattling the hard dry pellets in their pods
Athwart the thunder of the seas,
At first I thought,
"Be still, you little fools."
And let him lie at ease;
This is some sorry jest of God's!
Some grim sidereal jape
At the dull triumph of material things,
Trying to tease
The dead moon's face to a sardonic gape
At bones that longed for wings."

Then with weird spectacles I saw,
Clothed in the watery shadows of the wind,
A form was there,
A spectral shimmer in the emptyness
Of hazy-greyness thinned
From light, less
Than a mould of hollow air.
Was it some lover's ghost come back to earth
To whisper the loved name
Now but a blur?
No!
All at once I understood the peas' dry mirth!
This was his soul
That had no place to go—
"He was a wanderer."