Erosion

Here is another one of my sonnets. It may have originally been intended as one of the "Four Element" cycle, but I'm not sure about that. It isn't my best work, but there are still bits of it that I care about.

How nature, etching, does herself erase,
Her windborne dust obscuring olden tracks
Of time and tide and rust and bone, and blacks
O’er life, o’er death, oe’r very wind’s own tracks!
We see the sea as well to well across
Archaic paths, to glaze, to sterilize
The spotted reefs where dwell with darkened eyes,
Unlit, her witnesses of crushing loss.
Yet life blows back and oozes forth the same,
Flows yet against the stream, though swept along;
What mother wets she whets, what teases, quells.
She tells the swells, Cut down, and calls by name
The wind to shriek destruction; yet the song—
The current—ever new-launched life propels.