It’s been ten thousand years since our eyes last met

On the day you submerged me in blindness

Your eyes so determined that I should forget

That they’d once been a vessel of kindness

 

A ship that steered me through treacherous seas

Your lashes fluttered like sails in the wind

Though all I could feel was a delicate breeze

That playfully tickled my back while I grinned

 

As the rigger, cabin boy and quarter master

You excelled in each post with tenacity

Never once grumbling that you had relented

To me – so unworthy in my captaincy

 

As I darted each day from starboard to port

Veering off course at the behest of the tides

I ignored your cautions to ‘abort, abort’

Pre-empting my peril, you still stepped aside

 

So from the plank I dived with whimsical glee

And near drowned in pursuit of a mermaid

Risking all to be a creature of the sea

Knowing very well you’d plunge to my aid

 

Though we shared the same deck, our hopes never wed

As we tried to make sense of our passage

Your eyes, they were fixed on the waters ahead

While mine were lost in a sky so lavish

 

And in this vein, we circumvented the earth

An unruly captain and her one-man crew

Refusing to moor at the pleasing berths

When this was all you’d ever wanted to do

 

Ten thousand sightless years have come to pass

Though more vivid my vision has never been

Your ship was my compass, my beacon and mast

This, I see now, what I should have then seen

 

And so on that day when you released your tears

Delivering to me what was rightfully mine

An ocean that’s wept for ten thousand years

Over a love adrift with the swells of time