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On old Cape Cod cover

On old Cape Cod

Chapter 58: The Throes Of Creation
By Ferdinand C. Lane
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Poetry

About This Book

A collection of lyrical poems that celebrates and mourns a coastal landscape through images of dunes, marshes, sea, winds, birds, flowers, lighthouses, shipwrecks, and changing seasons. The work blends close natural observation with wistful memory and maritime lore, moving between quiet descriptive pieces and dramatic evocations of storms and loss. Recurring motifs such as salt, sand, driftwood, and light bind domestic scenes and seafaring sketches to themes of transience, rootedness, and the consoling, restorative power of place.

The Throes Of Creation

Crash and a smother of foam
Drowned in a booming roar!
That is the way the surge comes home
Pounding along the shore.
Hiss and a seething tongue
Laps at the crumbling sand!
That is the way the sea has wrung
Room from the grudging land.
Rasp of the undertow
As its white tongue flays the beach,
Flensing the pebbles to and fro
Into its treacherous reach.
Ever the sob and moan
Of the tortured ledges rings
Grinding to dust and welding to stone
Ever the hammer swings.
Never a solid ground
Nor a fixed and steadfast place;
Shoals new risen and islands drowned
Sculpture the landscape’s face.
Thus were the corners laid
For the continents and the seas;
That is the way the world was made
Out of such conflicts as these.
Up from the ocean’s bed;
Into the ocean cast
Surging through infinite ages ahead
Out of an infinite past.

The Methodist Meeting House at South Truro was known to many old timers as Hog’s Back Church. The following verses were written while it was still standing, though long deserted and neglected. But to those who knew and admired it, as I did, it deserves something more than the simple granite slab that marks its site. For it remains a lasting memory of a former era on old Cape Cod.