by Antony Raine

Black sand, black sand
How you sit so long and slender,
Before me like a velvet cloak,
Basking under blazing sun,
With no-one here to love you
But my weathered young heart,
And the old wrinkled fisherman,
In his faded shirt and withered hands,
Saddled with nothing but the salty air,
Hacking coconuts on your black sand.



And how black sand you are freckled;
Speckled and heckled even!
By crackling shells and coral stone
From the womb of your mother ocean,
Who whips and spits,
A ripping wail of white foamed cloud,
Flailed to your black sand shoreline
And buries me;
An island on your island
In the bosom of your black sand.

Black sand, oh black sand,
Will you soon forsake me?
I sit in the mouth of Eden,
Amongst the palm tree groves
In a symphony of a silent hour
When only the sound of the tide
Shall hear my murmuring,
And only the curling hood of crashing waves
Shall see what my eyes see;
Before me not a soul but a sight,
Of a naked blue horizon of glittering sea.



For today she is all mine to love,
And today her song is mine alone,
For she is asylum from my island,
And I hear her siren play for me alone
‘Til the breakers yield and my lungs surrender,
And the ocean and I are of one breath,
Safe from the flight of a whispering breeze,
And the mournful call of minarets,
Over paddy fields wrung with sweat and smoke,
And the haunting dirge of the ocean’s depths.

Black sand, my black sand,
How do you not desert me?
When the ocean roars her thunderous spill,
Her riptide full,
Yet her sorrow tender,
For the throne I burrow,
With my bare hands spent,
In my empire of solace,
This velvet cloak of ugly splendour.

Copyright: Antony Raine 2013


Antony Raine is a singer/songwriter with an unconventional story. From writing music in a former Uruguayan brothel, to performing in illegal theatre houses in Montevideo, the London-based troubadour hit the ground running in late 2013 when his storytelling debut EP, ‘Farewell to Arms’, reached no. 12 in the iTunes Singer/Songwriter Chart and received airtime on BBC Radio 6.  His second EP, ‘Blood & Treasure’, is out this spring 2014.

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