Today's poem is by Derek Mong

The Ghost Ship
       

The sea surrounding them they barely knew;
the fog was constant. Sirens trailed the violence
through the hills but taught them silence.
Their son would learn to walk along these avenues.
Date night downtown: they slipped into a fugue
of cocktailed youth they hoped to hold against
the rising tide of parenthood, the rents.
They parked a car where once there'd just been dunes.
Earthquakes whispered up their trees.
They read of ships left crewless in the harbor
whose wreckage stretched the nation's western bounds.
Once their child ran heedless into the sea.
Their front porch shrugged and split its mortar.
Occasionally they dreamt the other drowned.

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Copyright © 2024 Derek Mong All rights reserved
from When the Earth Flies into the Sun
Saturnalia Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission