No lame excuses can gloss over
Barge-tar clotted at the tide-line, the wrecked pier.
I should have known better.
Fifteen years between me and the bay
Profited memory, but did away with the old scenery
And patched this shoddy
Makeshift of a view to quit
My promise of an idyll. The blue’s worn out:
It’s a niggard estate,
Inimical now. The great green rock
We gave good use as ship and house is black
With tarry muck
And periwinkles, shrunk to common
Size. The cries of scavenging gulls sound thin
In the traffic of planes
From Logan Airport opposite.
Gulls circle gray under shadow of a steelier flight.
Loss cancels profit.
Unless you do this tawdry harbor
A service and ignore it, I go a liar
Gilding what’s eyesore,
Or must take loophole and blame time
For the rock’s dwarfed lump, for the drabbled scum,
For a churlish welcome.

—————

The End

And that’s the End of the Poem

© Poetry Monster, 2021.

Poems by topic and subject.

Poetry Monster — the ultimate repository of world poetry.

Poetry Monster — the multilingual library of poetic works. Here you’ll find original poems, poetry translations, ancient verses, ballads and even folk tales.

Poetry Monster (or even The Poetry Monster) — is also an international multilingual community of poets and poetry connoisseurs. Join us:

Register.

Some external links: The Bat’s Poetry Cave. — Fledermaus’s poetry site. Talking Writing Monster. — the irreverent and irrelevant chatter on subjects both serious and not quite. A free for all board. You can scribble anything on it without registration (but it doesn’t let spammers in). You can even post your poems. Qwant.com. — a search engine from France. It’s an alternative because there are a few alternatives, like Bing, Duckduckgo, and Ecosia. And there is Yandex, the ultimate language-oriented search engine for the Russophone world. Commercial Links: Russian Commerce – the foreign trade assistance agency Other links: Poems and poetry in Russian (if you are reading this in English, as you obviously are, then you’d have to switch the language, the language switch is on the menu. More on languages)