Long after the net was tugged in
And its catch spread out on golden sands,
After the struggling prisoners were
Claimed by calloused work-worn hands,
Space
The repudiated, graveless,
Look on with glassy lifeless eyes,
At the dusk’s orange rhapsody
And the night’s star-sprinkled skies,
Space
While their elegant fins
And scales of vibrant and flamboyant hue
Decay along with their supple flesh;
For the hungry scavenger nature’s due.
Space
Then sunrise and its sanguine sermon
With a breeze would scatter ceremonial sand,
Accompanied by the swaying pandanus’s rustle-song
On those who knew the purgatory of land,
Space
For they were once nobles and princes
Beneath the infinite shifting liquid cerulean,
But now with eyeless skulls and mangled flesh
They lie unburied upon cold sand.
Shailendra Ahangama