I don't need mawkish paintings to see
the drowning rowboat tethered to the dock,
a withered salmon clinging to debris
as umber water seeps through feeble stock.

The cord grass will have grown up through the planks
to marry splinters teeming on the pier,
putrescent pillars tilted by the banks;
a pallid corpse beside the marsh's bier.

Those summers when they sailed through brackish mist
have long since gone the way of floating sculls
that languish in the asters to be kissed
by empty oarlocks perched atop their hulls.

Your forgotten ghost still flounders on the fen
then sinks beneath in nightmares now as then,
a story only held dear to a Grook like me,
but forgotten to the rest, is fair Ulangi.

Penned by my hand on Kinsday, the 4th of Lanosian, in the year 480 MA.