Driftwood

Tumbled from the backwash of a fishing boat,

Laved in salt and damascened with worm-

Loops scrolling the long arm’s length of it,

It rehearses in our son’s musing hands

A history of fells and sail-roads, of flare-ups,

Strongholds, the terror-monger at last laid low,

And the gold-hoard hauled from its barrow.

Stripped from the tree of reckoning, arrayed

Against the world’s unpunished harms,

May it still serve in the coming years to bolster

The peacemaker’s heart in him, to steer him

Around whatever new perils must now

Precede that homecoming folktales tell us is

The end-all meaning of our journeying.