Self Exiled To This Isle Of Sorrow..... Poem by John Tansey

Exiled,
from my wife, child,
family and home
I am alone on this isle of sorrow.

The totem poles of poems
lay toppled,
like tombstones upon the shelves,
God no longer found among them.

I have put down the pen

I am unable to write,
sitting quietly alone
in a room. deafened
by thoughts of the past,

I spend the night with ghosts
plunging backward,
through the years
to when I was a boy,
standing before the ocean,
and the long shadow of my father
saying go ahead, be a man

I could not then, I cannot now

Running back to the sand,
the image of my mother in her sunglasses,
I cried the water was too blue,
the ocean too vast

(I never learned to swim,
it is a basic act of survival
that reveals a lot about someone)

With memories more vivid than the present,
a blue mirage though my throat is parched,
life deserted,
and the tide gone out,

I stand, like a child, crestfallen
at my failed quest for manhood,
feet sinking in the surf
of the shoal’s edge

And before the lapping waves of the sea,
to hear the song of the whale,
a sea goddess
like a woman, a mother
the mythic manatee
of sailors,
her tail fin waving
go ahead, leap

it will be all right...