The Island Poem by Caroline Misner

My daughter is an island I’ve never known
in lavender shadows, swathed in stone.
Remote as the wind-buffed cliffs,
all alone,
she weeps with the gulls in broken
crags of stone.

I could cross the channel to her shore,
through pewter mist, I’d dip each oar.
To the pearly glitters of her
silent soul
I’d scrape the keel upon the furthest
naked shoals.

Clouds in woolly garb siphoned from my reach,
as distant as my sweet hermit’s beach.
The winter’s bare knuckles disclose
no secrets,
and the scant winds offer
no regrets.

Unbothered by the problems of petty girls
she stands alone in her watery world.
Strumming her hair like the strings
of a harp,
a white sea bursts its altar and takes
her apart.

A cavalcade of deer stalk the woods
and watch the sea where her island stood.
While the airplanes whine like wasps
overhead,
she turns away from me on
her ledge.