Cracking the door open a smidge and peeking back in for a moment or two. Oh the challenge of keeping the writers quiet with their paperless canvas, when all the world is swirling and brimming and blustering and shining.
Voiceless it cries,
Wingless flutters,
Toothless bites,
Mouthless mutters.
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
The Land Where The Unknowns Live
She sailed her boat on the seas of life where the winds blew white capped waves
Deep cracks and crevices on broken seas crept over her vessel’s sides
She sailed her craft under a sky so grey, with tears on cusp of breaking edge
Salty, stockpiled and ready to roll
Stealing salt from the tops of waves
And she sailed her ship, solo, so alone
To a land where the unknowns lived
Under night dark skies, painted charcoals, ebonies, and slates
Highlighted in battleship greys
Mirroring the melange of a heart and soul
And the sails they flapped and flailed and feinted, tattered and torn
So weak and wobbly worn
Ripped under the power and might of the storms
The swirling howling honking sounds came
And the all arounds blew
Under its gale-force currents of power and might
The breakables broke and the sediment shifted
While the trees they snapped, the roots gave way
As the wind tears all that’s shallow and weak
And the limbs bent, broke, tumbled, tossed
Then felled
As the howling power, like a runaway train
Brought the loose things loose while the winds swept the land
And carried things off in a current of cleansing
As the wind blew through, cutting a jet black night
But oh the morning it brings the new
A cleansing of a dark and broken soul
And rolls back all black
And saves the tears for some
Other day
And shines the light of Joy on all dark
As the sun shines radiant through the trees
The wind blows fresh through the cheeks puffed full
Of Hope through the land where the unknowns live
So she mends her sails, or did He mend them for her
And re-rigs her boat, or did He repair that too
Her working parts and pieces
Sending her off on a journey new
On a sea of redemptive swells
Where the pitch and toss
And the windswept new bring Hope to a journey, new
Fueled by the breeze so gentle and soft
Of a kind and whispering wind
Touching tender the cheeks of the smiling face
Of the land where the unknowns live.
elizabeth w. marshall 