Persons reported missing remain to be found.

You were once a lighthouse,
flashing purple flames of clouded guidance across a sea
you had never seen the other side of.
When the storms came, you would slice apart the fog
with your certainty of better days and quiet, painless nights.

Then one day you
just
gave up,
your shining salt-washed stones tumbling
one by one into the sea.

You became a tide of your own, unmeasured, untimed,
calling not the ocean but only the blood
in my veins.
You call with a force like silver cords
bound to the fibers of my soul.
I come to your spirit like sand
pulled helplessly into the waves,
only to be shoved
away
without warning,
without reason,
scrambling for purchase;
begging you,
“Please,
let me stay.”

Time must have changed you when you fell.
You never answer,
only push away with tidal power
that always turns again
just when I decide to let it carry me away.
Oh, remembrance—
for I can see your foundations buried beneath the sand,
a testament to your once-outstanding stability,
the hope within your guidance that once brought sailors in from sea,
sailors like me
who followed your light.
Shh!
If you listen,
you can hear us
as we sing:

it is,
it was,
it will always-and-forever be
too long
too late
to love.