what can I tell you of that other country

One last extra poem, for those days I missed in the middle of the month. This is another one I would have loved to post while I was on my adventures in the Mediterranean, if only I'd remembered to bring it with me.

The little now is all I ever knew,
this seaport city of my years,
this shore I walk on, that the tides
gnaw as the sea rises and keeps rising.

What can I tell of what occurred
before my birth, that foreign, sunrise land?
I cannot know it, though my isle
was once a part of it. I used to watch
the long, bright caravans creep down the roads
from fabled mountains, out to the promontory
of the morning where my city stood.

Those roads are long since undersea.
We only have what drifts to us from there
over dark waters: fragments
of carven wood, a hollow green glass globe.
Some papers in a sealed chest
in a strange writing, half effaced.
A storm-blown bird, whose song
receives no answer here.

I sent my ships to rumored western lands,
heavy with hopeful cargo.
And for a long time they returned
laden with wine and honeycomb,
silk, linen, opals, amethysts.
The sailors sang as they rowed in to harbor.
All they brought they laid out on the beach.
I went in splendor in the city then.

Few ships go out now, few come back, and those
are empty, dancing on the waves.
What can I tell you of that other country
from which my caravels return
so lightly, with thin sails that let light through,
and thin sides, and grey-haired sailors,
and the broken amphorae empty?

—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929), "The Merchant of Words," from Life Sciences: New Poems, 2006-2010, although in this case actually from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).