A Golden Afternoon: The Collected Poetry of the Late Matthew Packard

However Came Ye to the Crimson-Speckled Shore?

Once upon a midnight stormy, clouds and rains across the sky,
Came a knock of rapid rapping high upon my shelter door.
Stood a stranger on my doorstep, and his neck was turned awry.
Asked he, “However came ye to the blood-speckled shore?”

Beguiled, I told the stranger, “Get thee out, thou dirty beggar!”
And he turned ‘way from my doorstep, but he looked still at my door.
Said the filthy stranger--on his shoulder stood a jaeger--
“Ye will rue the day ye step upon the crimson-speckled shore.”

With no earthly clue of what it meant and no idea of what he warned,
I turned away and went inside, and swiftly closed the door.
But why in heaven’s name did that deceiver say with scorn
That I would rue the day I stepped upon the grisly shore?

Nary an answer disclosed itself when once again a knock
Came beating with more force than had ever plagued my house before.
And once again I answered; upon the stranger did I gawk,
But here there was no caution of a fabled bloodstained shore.

‘Twas a distant relative who lived across the bay,
And frantically he stepped inside my twice now opened door.
Said my kinfolk, “Come thee quick! Come, come, now this way!”
My cousin I did follow down the beach onto the shore.

My eyes’d yet to deceive me as they did so on that night,
And with a shudder I saw what I had never seen before.
The heart inside my chest nearly burst from such a fright,
For there was strewn my family, killed upon the crimson shore.

A yelp escaped my lips and many tears dripped from my eyes,
And my cousin turned away my face so I could look no more,
But etched inside my mind was the scene of which I’d been apprised
I knew now why the stranger warned so grimly of the shore.

Without a peek of what lay now before my troubled soul,
I looked upon the rocks above the beach and trembled more,
For there, with pity in his eyes, stood the stranger on the knoll,
And shouted, “However came ye to the crimson-speckled shore?”