Friday, January 2, 2026

Burning the Ship

The smell of salt and burning cedar

Is rising from the shore

Smoke is a shroud 

Obscuring

All that has gone before

I sailed away from your wasteland

I harrowed your stormy seas

I thought that I could tame them

But it was they that harrowed me

The waves they rocked and tossed me

My feet knew no solid ground

The rudder was but a stubborn fin

Tracing circles, round and round

And so from you I wrest the wheel

To run this ship aground

When first I burnt that rudder

Your lying tongue was stopped

Stilled by the taste of the flames

Stifled by the salt

The hand on the wheel had never been mine

The boat slid in the stillness wrought

Borne onward with the tide

Oh, that torch of cedar shone

Showed me a coast where refuge lay

Keel met stone with a violent groan

A derelict was made

And there on the strand

I burned the past 

Claimed this land my own

Another match, the hull to ash

Found my footing in the heat of the blaze

On that funeral pyre, as its fury licked higher

The sum of us now null in that burning 

Till in smoking lull “we” lay

The smoke in the air

Was my freedom fare

Purchasing my future by the death of our past

No longer tempest tossed

My land legs new bought

Eyes to the green

To hell with the sea

To hell with you

Forward, it’s me


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