The Dunes

The dunes, the silent sentinels of the land That range along the lea, In revery unbroken, there they stand And gaze far out to sea Across their wind swept crests the breezes play In cadence sad and sweet, The restless sands whip ever day by day Their surf tormented feet. The dying sunbeams gild their crags with gold Then purple into night, Around their slopes the elves of twilight fold A film of spectral light. A landscape wild that one might see in dreams Or on the pallid moon, Blue shadows traced in silver by her beams In many a cryptic rune. Or etched against the winter sky they show An outline weird and stark, Their pale sands melting like the sparser snow Into a background dark. With scudding clouds, reflected on the dull Gray mirror of the sea. Cut by the wing points of a lonely gull In poised expectancy. The distant sand bars mark the skeletons Of other vanished dunes, Their crests were once upreared to other suns And other ghostly moons. The seething shoals once foamed beneath your feet And maddened tide rips swirled Whence risen proudly you can stand and greet The older, firmer world. Unstable element of shifting sand Whose contours ever change, But moulded by great nature’s groping hand In shapes bizarre and strange. We too, from sand have fashioned castled towers For waves to wash away, But her creations crumble much like ours Though in a grander way. Nature, like man, forever vainly strives To conquer time and tide; She toils long aeons, we our briefer lives And both unsatisfied!