The Song of Kirke (Part II)

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 tincturing rose of the mist dispersed through an island's extent, for us incandescent and shield-like under day's jealous glare. There desert beach mounted on desert beach, rising into rings of rugged cliff upon which perched, then fell, strands of lichen and moss, silver and glistening with the damp of precipitate streams. Cliff leveled into green mesa, an ocean sown of the sun's violet embrace and flowering into blooms of evanescence 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 a stupor through which glowed, or upon which prevailed, a clarion sharper than the human voice, but more expansive too in its lotus serenity.

We beached our ships and left the keels to dry on the prowed and patterned shore. Men clambered onto the shore, seeking out fresh streams for weary limbs, fell goats by the puncture of spears. Others coerced the silicious fire's seeds on appendages dry from the forest, and lit a lusty scorcher for the service. They split carcasses from legs, poured libations, and feasted on entrails of beastly flesh, brought brimming-fat to boils of sputtering grease, and ladled into their bellies concatenations of wine that flowed into dissolutions of strained arms and strewing legs.