Outlaw

On the sea shore, empty, shiny

Where the breeze blows swift and briny

Footprints pock the new-washed sand

Straying into dawn-lit distance

Marking down with mute insistence

Space and time by sentience spanned.

Beach grass on the dune tops, binding

Land against the ocean’s blinding

Sunrise-bright retreat and charge

Whispers of a hard survival

Long before that new arrival

Wandered on the windy marge.

At his birth a demon told him

Neither land nor sea could hold him

Earth itself would shrink too small

So he roams the ragged borders

Reckless of the law that orders

All with one and one with all.

Here amidst the breakers’ frothing

Footprints fill and fade to nothing

Nothing loved and nothing learned

Gone beyond the world’s redeeming

Figment of a demon’s dreaming

Space and time by sentience spurned.