It may be that your eyes shade

towards the colour of promise,

that your fingers, half-elves,

may sow my desolate wastelands

and restore the green

that came before the golden blaze.

Solitude wanders haunted,

tracing the footprints

(perhaps mirages)

that emerge and vanish,

wayward beneath the sand.

The whim of shapes

plays at being the mould

of your rambling feet;

and I miss you so deeply, Friday,

as if I had already brushed

your hips against the wind,

as if the isthmus of your presence

had at last bound

the abyss of madness, the naïve hope,

to be one, alone, here,

the very same self, ever.

Here I go with the next poem in the series. Somehow it leans towards the romantic side for the first time, I agree, rather than the more metaphysical or introspective tone of the others. Anyway, as the narrator-protagonist identifies with the castaway figure, there is a point where presence, absence and desire mix.

Our relationships — not just romantic ones, but also those of friendship or camaraderie — are based on a mixture of people who mark us. Past lovers, or friends, for good or ill, are inside you. Maybe you forget their faces, their names; maybe they are still so present, their loss was so traumatic and sudden that they stand by you like your own shadow.

The phantoms that populate our souls, so real, trace their footprints on the sand of dreams. We even expect to meet them again in some form, or we fear their presence like a plague. Anyhow, let’s remember we are, for them , fish in the same sea.

Thank you, readers.

I submerge my grief in the depths
Of the element, on a mission
To coax pearls from it, but the attempts
Are fruitless.

Slow to react, the waves
Batter me against a delta
Of contradiction; the sands
Turn opaque. They form, conspire—
Abyssal pupils in the jewels
That plait their Möbius rosary.

This clumsy weight of a mere cetacean
Threatens to lay me low in stranding.
And despite the harpoons I haul—
Because anarchic— once upon a time
I moved dykes unscathed, alone,
Just with the harp of my fingers.

Nowadays,
More whale and more Arctic than ever,
I foresee the capture: some black day
Of low tide or lame captain, sharing with death
My mother-of-pearl dreams,
To perish amid blanks in blinding.

Perhaps, weary of fleeing so long,
I’ll grant the victor excuses,
Invent a guilt for my punishment,
To pay the price of an extended lull.

Weathered by suns and salts, I deny
Hecatombs of storms and shipwrecks—
No finer cetarium than this island,
No finer hoard than inner silence.

Thank you for reading the poem, if you’ve made it this far. I don’t know what crossings it will have taken you through. I won’t deceive you if I say that much of what I write comes from places I don’t know myself. Part of everyone remains in shadow. The further you venture into the ocean, the more pressure and the less light define your surroundings. If one fears reaching those depths because monsters and never-before-seen creatures dwell there, one also forgoes the beauty, the encounter with sunken treasures.

The creative act sways between light and darkness. So I try to hold my breath and keep my eyes wide open when the shadows fall, when a storm draws near, at the bottom of a blurred sea where colours no longer reach. I hold my breath, and if need be I double over in pain — yes — but that shadow, that reverse side, belongs to me, and it must sing its song, shout its cry.

The poem, the story, the tune converse with the shadow, let the light in even if only for an instant. And then one can breathe again and return safely. Because someone needs to tell it, like Ishmael, like Jonah, like Paul. And those powerful beings that dwell in the shadows, vestiges of what we are and what we once were, also give the sea its meaning.

Let us sail on.

I’m back with another poem from the Name Me series. For readers who don’t yet know the project, it’s a collection of poems and illustrations that will form a printed book, so any feedback is welcome. In the near future I’ll need beta readers to finish the volume... The whole thing, as I’ve said before, is a modern allegory of Robinson Crusoe. You might say we’re all islands sharing the same sea.

In this case, the ideas and questions that arise for me from reading centre on those liminal states—whether of pleasure or suffering—where in some way we surrender to life’s inertia, we can’t go on, overwhelmed by a grandeur that exceeds us. We live in a world obsessed with control, algorithms and logarithms, AI and planners, productivity and efficiency. We dream we’re in control, that we can know how the mechanism works.
Yet every so often a crack opens in the scenery and an unexpected light pours in; we see an overwhelming panorama. Each person defines it according to their culture and expectations: artistic, religious, philosophical… I won’t go into that. I think all illuminations are also a passing illusion. I simply observe, surrendered, adrift, like music coming from afar that I may never hear again. How do you deal with that waves?

Greetings from this shore.

The Waves

Soft curves hesitate
as a bashful gallant,
a sedated straight way

In themselves or beyond their thirst they turn —
lunatic, they shift

Their dance without a partner,
never finding that cape
where the skein expires

The rocking chair of salt
invites surrender —
to swing, to sing

Going, becoming the shine
of the hours' idle reverie,
yellow, mars mellow melodie

It strains without effort, breaks,
pursues its singular path,
listens to an uneven

Lullabay
that cradles my communion in inertia,

joy foam, swift question

That wonders till a point of no return

© 2026 by Rafa Martin

Don Maguire paused for a moment beneath the eaves, watching the rain wash Oroville’s paths away. He was late for the National Day celebration. He opened his umbrella and, after no more than two steps forward, something pierced his lower back like a burning shard.

Barely conscious, Don opened his eyes again: a frog with a golden crown was staring into his pupils; blood ran from his lying body, painting thin streams on the ground. The wind was stealing the dark umbrella into the night.

"Now I stay. You go."

The animal puffed out its white throat, sprang into the air, and vanished over a puddle stippled by the drops.

The shaft pinning him to the damp earth was a piece of cedar, hand-carved more than a century ago. Red-tailed hawk feathers, as if gathered the same day, bannered the arrow that had once belonged to the last free man of those lands. Thousands of shadows danced along in a secret, lost chant clapped with bare feet.

Thanks for reading. If you like it, please, share!

All righst reserved. RM 2026

RAIN IN THE TOWN OF GOLD was originally published in Flashes of Fiction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.