Rockall

MICHABL ROBERTS

ROCKALL

Comforting is sleep, but the comfort fails:

The waves break on the bare rock; the traveler remembers

Shipwreck, the struggle with the waters, the wild climb,

Cries of the wind; and then nothing.

Rockall, two hundred miles west of Bembecula,

Bare rock, eighty-three feet wide, seventy feet high,

First seen by Captain Hall, 1810, reported inaccessible-

The last spur on the Great Atlantic Shelf.

How shall the mind think beyond the last abandoned islands?

The gulls cry, as they cry in the isles of despair,

The waves break, as they break on Tiree or Foula;

Man is alone, and death is certain.

Was it better to have died in shipwreck?

Here, naked under the bare sky,

The traveler wakes; and sanity is the same as madness

Under the grey sky pressed down to the sea's rim.