Читать книгу The Searchlights - Wilfrid Wilson Gibson - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Day after day the sentries keeping guard

Along the ramparts of the embattled strand

See her still pacing the harsh sallow sand,

Stopping at times to stare again with hard

Glazed tearless eyes across the bleak North Sea—

Day after day. And now they try no more

To hold her back from the restricted shore

To which each dawn her heart remorselessly

Draws her at the first glint of Wintry light

To keep her watch by the indifferent tide,

Impelled by hope that will not be denied,

And only fails her at the fall of night,

To be renewed at daybreak by the cry

Of gulls that reaches her on her sleepless bed—

Gulls that all day will wrangle overhead

With white wings glancing sharply against a sky

Of slatey cloud unrestingly, as she

Paces the desolation of the beach—

Fierce gulls whose every beaked and taloned screech

Tears at her vitals, and yet seems to be

The voice of her anger against the sea that keeps

Her love from her so long—her love who went

From her that raw December daybreak, bent

On the risky dredging of the mine-sown deeps,

Three years ago—the sea that keeps him still,

Keeps him in secret and yields her heart no news

Save that which in the skirling of the mews

Stabs her with anguish, and yet cannot kill

The hope within her.

The hope within her.So, day after day

The sentries see her pacing, till one dawn

They note the yelling gulls have all been drawn

Into a yammering flock that in the grey

Light hangs above a bundle on the sand,

Where, at length lapt in peace, with ears and eyes

Mercifully deaf and blind to the birds, she lies,

Harrassed by hope no longer, on the strand.