The Ocean's Letter to the First Lighthouse (Revised)

[billy]

A letter to the first lighthouse


Oh, yellow-eyed cyclops
Mapping the night
With a carouseling stare
How much mystery
Did I own before
The language of your light?

I remember stone-piked shores
Stabbing the bellies of boats,
Coral reefs ambushing sailors (granite reefs maybe bur somehow coral doesn't work for me. that's something i associate with wide beaches and sloping shores.)
Like Apache, in the black-water night. [would "like an apache" work better?]
Men who saw nor heard nothing
But the thickening dark curtain
Of silence and seawater
Men who met the taste of salt,
Then, the limp pose of death.
[i really like the above verse, the edit here works well for me]

So Banner of man
Mammoth of masonry
Perched on the divide
Of humanity and me
Swinging your flail of fire
Above my creeping tide,
This is my resignation
To you.

For soon, I’ll be like the coast-
A place for man to stroll down
With no worry, with no mystery
As man clenches the land
Man will clench the sea

the last two lines work but feel a little awkward. the edit certainly works for me, it's more direct and i think it reads better. i really do think the oppertunity to create a series is great.

it helps if you place an edit over the original so we have something to compare without going from page to page

---

Even as I write,
I see sailors navigating
The stone-toothed coast
Boats dodging coral reefs
Move smoothly through the sea,
Docking in their city ports

Oh, the countless trophies
You have stolen from me
And oh, the countless hours
I have spent worrying
Thinking with each breaking wave
“When I will be nothing more
Than a highway?”

I know
The coast will be the first to go.
Why?

Because once, the sun was a chariot
Once, dragons slept in the hills
Once, I was ruled with a trident,
And once, there was chaos
Then, fire.
Crude fire.