The Rock In The Sea

Think of our blindness where the water burned!

Are we so certain that those wings, returned

And turning, we had half discerned

Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen

The bird aloft there, did not mean?—

Our hearts so seized upon the sign!

Think how we sailed up-wind, the brine

Tasting of daphne, the enormous wave

Thundering in the water cave—

Thunder in stone. And how we beached the skiff

And climbed the coral of that iron cliff

And found what only in our hearts we’d heard—

The silver screaming of that one, white bird:

The fabulous wings, the crimson beak

That opened, red as blood, to shriek

And clamor in that world of stone,

No voice to answer but its own.

What certainty, hidden in our hearts before,

Found in the bird its metaphor?