Isles of Comfort

Isolation beyond all human touch--
An unjust, random, corrosive fate--
Bellwethers a storm of maladjustments:
Domino cascades of wrongful acts,
Spiteful slights, and dire retributions
That shimmer through the social fabric,
Unravel it at every stitch and fold.
A smattering of exceptions--
A minority of years enlacing limbs and lives--
Can't compensate for eons of apartness,
Compounded when some coo-birds roost nearby
And trill about their extra-special bonding,
While in the brine the unpaired swimmers fail
And flail about for any love preserver:
A sandbar with a windracked palm upon it;
A flotsam pillow on a flotsam bed;
Another shipwrecked sailor clutching timbers.
The wretchedest of rocks would sure suffice
If on its seaweed-plastered face one other
Might scramble up above the tidal splash,
And two�"like crabs�"could scuttle off together
To claim the meager islets as their own.