Blood, Fire, and Bones


She is the master,
A crucible for those that test or try to endure her.
Blood, fire, and bones,
Bled, blistered, stripped, bleached clean.
The Skeleton Coast.

The sapphire, frigid fingers of the Agulhas current, ice the churning surf.
Spittle and foam all but hiss on her scorched tongues of beach.
One wonders; Why is there not steam
On the rim of this furnace of desolation?
Surely one must find brimstone here.

Diaphanous layers of fog build in the night,
Tonguing the towering caramel walls of dune,
Spilling across her lap in a vast membranous quilt,
As if releasing her ghosts to play each dawn.
Mists swirl in eddies as the morning heat soars.

And the furnace always prevails.
Her ethereal dreamland of ivory mist melts away
Leaving only these persimmon lands,
A desolate, parched Martian world,
Crowned instead with a topaz sky.

And yet,
There is a haunting peace here, it changes you.
A quiet grandeur,
An almost dignified resplendence in the carved edges and
The fierce shadows of her ten thousands of dunes.
It is as if there were a primitive silicon intelligence
In these sprawling waves of saffron and paprika.

Wave... trough... wave... - endlessly, earth mirrors sea.
Long ropey sinews, undulating wind whipped oceans of sand,
Frozen in place
Yet constantly:
Slipping, moving, changing,
Reforming, shaping, sculpting.
The winds and the grains march and churn,
Rolling upon one another in a cosmic order
That only they understand.

She is insatiable,
Lethal, this vixen of thirst.
Succulent, vital, moisture,
Spit out, spent, wasted.
Her countenance, though fair,
Will suckle you to prayer
That she will take you in the next velvet breeze,
Or spill your blood out onto her loins,
Adding your iron to hers.

She is the master,
A crucible for those that test or try to endure her.
Blood, fire, and bones,
Bled, blistered, stripped, bleached clean.
The Skeleton Coast,
Home,
To the dreams of my spirits.
Symbiotic to the song in my soul.