The Mariner Poem by Theresa Haffner

He sails the sea
in a boat with a broken oar
the tattered sail at half mast
the untended rudder
drifting this way and that.
there is no destination
for the sea goes on forever.
there is no shore.
the ocean has no other side
the current is deep
and the water impenetrable
obscuring the mystery
of it’s depths
underwater rivers like
submerged emotions
hiding the end as well as the
beginning
He doesn’t know how long
he has been drifting,
perhaps forever
for as long as he has
had memory.
he doesn’t know how long
it will continue
The mist and fog
obscure the stars and sky.
The clouds obscure the moon.
There is no way to chart a course
no way to hold direction
out of the endless darkness
without hope of dawn.
He does not feel despair.
he does not feel.. anything.
The wind, usually becalmed
sometimes gathers storms
to whip the waves to frenzy
white capped, cresting, primordial,
breaking all about him
threatening to capsize the
little boat, breaking it to pieces
and strewing its wreckage
across the uncharted reefs.
And when the storm is exhausted
and the sea is calm again
he is left to himself
on the deck, alone, silent,
but for the cries of sea birds.
His food is brought to him,
spare bounty of the sea,
by whales and porpoises,
and at other times by mermaids
dressed in scales and seaweed.
They are his only company
other than his dreams.

But this is not the only
life he had lived.
Once, before he was a mariner,
before he had been born to this life,
long before he could even remember
he was a sojourner riding
in a camel caravan of one.
crossing the vast desert
from sand dune to sand dune
searching the parched oases
where he could pitch his camp
beneath the arid palm trees,
a merchant with his goods
he hoped one day to sell
but there was no one there
to buy them yet.
The sand storms,
crescent moon and stars.
The colored silk of his tent
The spices and perfumes of
The women who came to see him then
that were actually figments of his
dream imagination.

loneliness and endless desert
the desert with no end.

Do you participate in your own dreams?
For that would make them more real.

Then he remembered he had
lived many lives before,
living many lives within
the one life

Many times before, to a new life,
a new set of circumstances
a new identity, so vivid that
it wiped out all memories
and in each one he must set about
the work of rediscovering his true identity
until at last the memories would return.

Difficult to talk about the past,
as if it wasn’t really real at all.
Only a function of the imagination,
sometimes expounded in a dream
which upon awakening could not be
distinguished from reality.

Always the sense of a journey with
uncertain beginnings and no ending.
Always the loneliness and the isolation,
longing for permanence in a life without meaning.

Once he drove Colorado highways from
mountain peak to mountain peak,
his entourage with him, as a prophet dealing
psychedelic drugs, as a priest spreading
enlightenment from high to high,
from love affair to love affair, from
religion to religion.

Once when he was a Black Magician
he was burned at the stake as a witch.

He had also lived as a musician
on a tour of one night stands
and two week engagements,
traveling from town to town
and city to city, leaving behind a network
of hastily formed relationships,
first names and changing faces,
having only his instrument
and the music to assuage his loneliness,
and later the addicted drugs.

He had lived as a pauper, a beggar on the streets,
a convict and a thief, and also as a holy man,
seeking wisdom on the mountain top
and dispensing it to his acolytes.
He had lived as a rich man
and also as a beautiful woman,
a priestess, a courtesan skilled in the
experience and creation of beauty.

Of them all, the life of the rich man
was by far the loneliest,
for no one gave him
true friendship, only what
they wanted from him.
He became a miser
and later he gave freely,
but he knew only after he
no longer had the riches
could he find true
happiness or friendship.

His life as a woman was briefest,
for being a woman made him aware of time.
For a woman’s life is divided
into seasons, each of which is fleeting,
until she finds herself longing
for her youthful beauty
which has gone irretrievably from her.

But each lifetime, which seemed forever,
would also come to its ending,
sometimes through violent means.
Through crime, sickness, loss, theft.
or sometimes just through broken dreams.


Time was the one thing he had
which would one day run out
as the mariner drifted
the trackless ocean currents
from treacherous reef
to mysterious deep.

He could not know
how much time he had left, or
how many more times
he would be reborn
For life was not like an hour glass
which runs out and is tipped up again

but like sand which sifts
through the fingers very slowly,
a little bit at a time,
every day of his life, until
at last he slipped into a sleep from
which he would not awaken.

He didn’t know when that day
would be.

Until then the mariner sat
on the deck of his tiny wooden craft
with the comical broken oar,
tattered sail at half mast,
the rudder drifting aimlessly,
no longer flattering himself
that he could chart a course,
the submerged ocean currents obscured,
staring ahead into the mist and fog.
The journey has no destination.
The ocean has no other side.
The sea he sails goes on forever.
The sea without a shore.