Goodbye, Islands

Pointe du Raz

Such tourists, clustered west as these
have tottered out to see lots left –

a little rack, courageous land,
point out their final fantasies:

and so it grows. Like being young,
the islands in the background, grainy,

shade a day ambitiously,
become the missing talismans –

like unrecorded songs, whose words
could curl a twingeing sense of loss,

or poems, neither primed
nor yet without the final will to give;

like bursts of gravel prose,
unsaved before the power shuts,

or prints, which now projected
face the rock, the blurring sea.

And no one gapes inland, or stops
to long for where they live, or

mull moreover, after, how
they could dread home, one afternoon.

Will Daunt