Driftwood

Driftwood Once part of a thing lone and simple, That stood breathing sky through a spray of green Held in a tangle of outspread arms, Some circumstance tore you loose from your moorings And cast you adrift, A wanderer on the unframed seas Whose eddies shaped and changed you Into your present enigma: something more and less Than you were when you were born. My eyes follow your strange contours, A shape pitted and twisted by lash of wave and solar fire, And the thought forms in me of how circumstance Carries us through the wild ocean of changes We call a life, Pulled loose from our moorings To ride along a vast and silent deep, Shaped by the lashings, burnings and turns of fate That transform us by degrees into something lovely, mysterious - Something more and less Than what we were when born.