Today I will let the old boat stand
Where the sweep of the harbor tide comes in
To the pulse of a far, deep-steady sway.
And I will rest and dream and sit on the deck
Watching the world go by
And take my pay for many hard days gone I remember.
I will choose what clouds I like
In the great white fleets that wander the blue
As I lie on my back or loaf at the rail.
And I will listen as the veering winds kiss me and fold me
And put on my brow the touch of the world's great will.
Daybreak will hear the heart of the boat beat,
Engine throb and piston play
In the quiver and leap at call of life.
To-morrow we move in the gaps and heights
On changing floors of unlevel seas
And no man shall stop us and no man follow
For ours is the quest of an unknown shore
And we are husky and lusty and shouting-gay.
lovely poem, especially this line, For ours is the quest of an unknown shore. Congrats on being poet of the day!
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
A reader who likes this choice from Carl Sandburg may kindly see a poem I wrote as an under-graduate in 1952, 'A Song of Waiting'; I sent it to PH decades later, and was pleased to see it included in my web-page (21/318) . A different age, a hemisphere away, but the theme is basically the same. A. Madhavan