I should have been delighted there to hear
The woman and the boy,
Singing along the shore together.
Lightly the shawl and shoulder of the sea
Upbore the plume and body of one gull
Dropping his lines.
Loping behind a stone too large for waves
To welter down like pumice without sound,
Laughing his languages awake, that boy
Flung to his mother, on a wrack of weeds,
Delicate words, a whisper like a spume
Fluting along the edges of the shore.
I should have been delighted that the cries
Of fishermen and gulls
Faded among the swells, to let me
Gather into the fine seines of my ears
The frail fins of their voices as they sang:
My wife and child.
Lovely the mother shook her hair, so long
And glittering in its darkness, as the moon
In the deep lily-heart of the hollowing swells
Flamed toward the cold caves of the evening sea:
And the fine living frieze of her Greek face;
The sea behind her, fading, and the sails.
I should have been delighted for the gaze,
The billowing of the girl,
The bodying skirt, the ribbons falling;
I should have run to gather in my arms
The mother and the child who seemed to live
Stronger than stone and wave.
But slowly twilight gathered up the skiffs
Into its long grey arms; and through the sea
Grew kind as possible to wrack-splayed birds;
And though the sea like woman vaguely wept;
She could not hide her clear enduring face,
Her cold divinities of death and change.