Beneath a moon that forgets its name, the cliff hums —

a low, sea-bone lullaby where gulls have no eyes.

The lighthouse stands like a tooth in the throat of night,

its glass mouth breathing fog into a world that misremembers.

Mist unspools from the island like old fishing nets,

tangled with the rubbed-out footprints of the vanished.

Wind scrawls hieroglyphs across the masonry; the stones

answer in the language of small, obstinate echoes.

Inside the lamp a slow heartbeat keeps vigil,

not of brass or flame but of something stitched from midnight.

Sometimes it opens like an eye and shows the ocean

as a ledger of memories— names ledgered and crossed out.

Boats arrive with no captains, their ropes knotted with silence.

They carry trunks of unsent letters and teeth that still count,

they carry mirrors that reflect yesterday’s weather,

and children who speak the weather’s secret names.

On certain tides the cliff exhales a chapel of bells:

salt-wet bells toll for anniversaries that never happened.

Shadows leave the lighthouse at dawn to seek their owners,

and sometimes come back changed, carrying seaweed in their mouths.

There are rooms in the tower where clocks grow mold and melt,

where maps redraw themselves into constellations of regret.

A portrait of a woman who never lived leans toward the stairs,

and if you touch her frame a tide will answer you in vowless speech.

The keepers — if keepers can be called those who keep absence —

polish the lens with hands that leave behind small, slow constellations.

They read aloud from weathered books, hymns no one taught them,

and sometimes the words bloom into gulls that forget how to fly.

At the edge the fog arranges its crooked altar,

placing objects it finds on the pews of the cliff: a child’s shoe,

a broken compass that points toward what someone once wished for.

The island listens, and in the listening the sea writes its will.

Late, when the lamp opens like a mouth to swallow the dark,

the lighthouse names the lost with a light that trembles.

Each name becomes a ripple, a small comet of salt,

and the mist, like a patient audience, applauds in silence.

If you come alone, do not ask the stones for directions.

If you listen, do not answer the wind when he asks your age.

The island remembers everything it never owned,

and the lighthouse keeps turning its slow, patient eye.

Here, time forgets to be straight. Here, ghosts sleep in earthen jars,

and the moon sometimes arrives in a boat, barefoot, humming.

Stay only long enough to learn the lighthouse’s true trade:

it does not guide ships home — it teaches them how to forget.