I met a stranger on the shore

Outside the overgrown cemetery,

Searching for something lost

The stranger’s face was clouded

With strained, pained recollection,

Trying to voice a silent echo of the past

This blaring silence resounds in me

A memory of that shore of long ago,

Which was once full of life, returns in force

Your image was clear in my mind

Like the once clear water of yore,

But is now clouded by the stranger

So fleeting is your remembrance,

A beach washed by the ebbing tide

And stripped of its soft white sand.

Only as you age and grow wise in time

Do you come to those distant, foreign shores

Where message bottles wash upon the sand.

I strove to impress a splendid epithet

To carve my grave in your cemetery

Of long-gone childhood and adolescence.

I was inspired to write a brilliant letter

To fit in my bottle for you to find

So that you might seek me out.

Shall I be as a shell upon the strand,

An admirably pretty, precious husk

To decorate that lacking tombstone?

Might I be a simple stone buried in the sand,

A detestable pebble uncovered only by force

To find a dream you thought forgotten?

I can no longer touch your soul like in the past.

My power to fix myself in your graveyard

Is but a shadow, a weak silhouette of a lost star.

I see you now, on this shore that we once shared

In our childhood and seasons of our youth,

But you are no longer who you were, nor am I.

Your name for my image is no longer mine,

I am unborn until acknowledged by you,

Forever confined to a womb of oblivion.