The Dunes
The dunes, the silent sentinels of the land
That range along the lea,
In revery unbroken, there they stand
And gaze far out to sea
Across their wind swept crests the breezes play
In cadence sad and sweet,
The restless sands whip ever day by day
Their surf tormented feet.
The dying sunbeams gild their crags with gold
Then purple into night,
Around their slopes the elves of twilight fold
A film of spectral light.
A landscape wild that one might see in dreams
Or on the pallid moon,
Blue shadows traced in silver by her beams
In many a cryptic rune.
Or etched against the winter sky they show
An outline weird and stark,
Their pale sands melting like the sparser snow
Into a background dark.
With scudding clouds, reflected on the dull
Gray mirror of the sea.
Cut by the wing points of a lonely gull
In poised expectancy.
The distant sand bars mark the skeletons
Of other vanished dunes,
Their crests were once upreared to other suns
And other ghostly moons.
The seething shoals once foamed beneath your feet
And maddened tide rips swirled
Whence risen proudly you can stand and greet
The older, firmer world.
Unstable element of shifting sand
Whose contours ever change,
But moulded by great nature’s groping hand
In shapes bizarre and strange.
We too, from sand have fashioned castled towers
For waves to wash away,
But her creations crumble much like ours
Though in a grander way.
Nature, like man, forever vainly strives
To conquer time and tide;
She toils long aeons, we our briefer lives
And both unsatisfied!