boat – Jane Dougherty Writes

There is a tide

There is a tide in our affairs,

The flood that leads to greater things,

A river rolling to the sea.

We live and love with little thought

For reefs and shoals, not caring that

There is a tide in our affairs.

We sail our barque and trim our sails,

A gull that soars on snow-white wings,

The flood that leads to greater things.

But habit turns to jagged rocks,

Shipwrecked our barque, poured out our love,

A river rolling to the sea.

Three line tales: Sabotage

Here is the story inspired by Sonya’s photo prompt.

Photo ©Wynand van Poortvliet

Moonlight lay on the placid harbour water, picking out the taut lines of the hawsers and running around the shiny gunmetal of the capstans.

His little ship was ready to take the morning tide, ready to leave as soon as the crew arrived, to carry him away from her.

Only a small craft, only six mooring lines, she said to herself as she bent to unwind the first, already seeing in her mind’s eye, the boat drifting away and safely out to sea.

A bottle of sea stars

Throw a bottle in the sea,

fill it with stars

and send it to me.

I take your bottle full of stars,

will I pour them out in silver streams,

watch them sparkle in the pools

of night and light and half-light dreams?

Where stars dance on the ocean’s skin,

torn by the wild wind from the sky,

from your blue boat with bellied sail,

throw me a lifeline and watch me fly.

Holding tight I skim the waves,

gull-backed and calling out to you,

hold out your hand, the one that saves.

I whispered your words into a shell,
The lies you used to tell me.
I took the shell out in a boat
And dropped it in the sea.
The water deep and dark and green
Swallowed the echoing words,
Left me alone with an empty heart
And a sky full of mocking birds.
The wind on the ocean murmured your name,
The waves rolled the words in the shell,
The gulls called out for the rest of the tale,
But there was nothing more to tell.

Microfiction: They took a boat

Microfiction of less than 200 words
based on the painting by Odilon Redon: la barque mystique

They took a boat, a blue boat with a yellow sail. Where could two runaway slaves go but the river? No one would chase them to the sea. Yet she shivered. He smiled and kissed her tenderly on the forehead, thinking to dispel her fears with his strength. He shrugged off the stories, but he knew nothing of the ocean. His people prayed for rain in the spring, died of drought in the summer. His land was parched; green was a colour he didn’t know.
Between river cliffs of yellow ochre they sped, until as evening fell, the little barque was borne out into the smooth ocean, green as glass. The current raced to the turquoise horizon, and thunder shattered the air into painful fragments.
What if the stories are true?
In her heart she knew they were.
His face contracted in fear when the current wrenched the little boat out of his control, and she pitied him. She wrapped her arms around his useless muscles, whispered words of love that were drowned in the thunder of the falling water. She held him tight as the little blue splinter of a barque shot over the edge of the world.

She watches the boat on the river

This is my promotion weekend and I’ve been having fun tweeting spoof endorsements of my books. On a more traditional note, here’s a poem from the final book of the series, Beyond the Realm of Night.

The wind on the river has blown you away
And your little white boat that pulled out from the trees
With its cargo of shadows and dreams left unsung
And the song that you sung was caught up by the breeze

Oh will you come back to me, love she calls
And bring back the piece of my heart you stole
For without you the day is as dull as the night
And without you the pattern will never be whole.

You turn and you wave but the light in your face
Shows her a sadness that no words could say.
I’ll come back when the sun lights the night sky, you call,
And silvery moonbeams will light up the day.

Book plug