The Song of Kirke (Part 1)

For nine days we sailed along, grieving in our heart, plunging our oars into the wine dark sea. On the tenth day, when primal Dawn had arched her fingers through the canopy of the sky, we drifted in a mass of fog, until the keels of our ships touched the breaking shore. The rose-tinctured mist dispersed through the extent of an island, incandescent and shield-like under the jealous glare of the day. Desert beach surmounted itself, rising into a rugged ring of cliffs, upon which perched or fell strands of lichen and moss, silver and glistening in the damp of precipitate streams. The cliffs leveled into a green mesa, an ocean sown by the sun's violet embrace and flowering into blooms evanescent, traced by and tracing split currents of light which seemed to recall to the surrounding clatter of waves an echo of their own hum abuzz in the thickness of stupor through which glowed or upon which prevailed a clarion sharper than the human voice, but more expansive too in its lotus serenity.