Upon a cliff where sea winds wail and sigh,
A lighthouse keeper fed his beacon’s flame,
He watched the vessels passing safely by,
And found his solemn purpose in their claim.

His daughter was his light within the tower,
With raven hair that danced upon the gale,
She filled his solitude with song each hour,
And helped him guide each homebound vessel’s sail.

One evening came a stranger to their door,
A sailor with a smile like morning sun,
He spoke of treasures from a foreign shore,
And swore her grandest days had just begun.

She begged her father’s heart to set her free,
But something in the stranger’s glance seemed wrong,
The keeper felt a darkness none could see,
Yet love is deaf to every warning song.

She fled into the storm, not looking back,
Upon the sailor’s ship she slipped away,
Her father stared until the world went black,
And prayed to see her face another day.

For seven years he kept his vigil still,
Through winter’s wrath and summer’s fleeting peace,
He nursed the light upon that lonely hill,
And searched in vain the endless‑troubled seas.

At last, too old to climb the winding stair,
He let the beacon die one final eve,
His hope extinguished in the ice-cold air,
Too tired to tend, too emptied out to grieve.

That night a vessel foundered in the rain,
He raised no hand—its fate no longer his.
At dawn the wreck lay strewn across the main,
A splintered hull, a silence, an abyss.

He searched the broken wreckage, blind with shame:
There his daughter lay, lips frozen on his name.

Author’s Note: “The Beacon and the Shoal” is written in tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, whose gothic narratives have haunted readers for nearly two centuries. The poem draws from several wellsprings of Poe’s craft: the atmospheric isolation of a solitary figure consumed by grief, reminiscent of “The Raven”; the doomed beloved whose loss drives the narrative, a theme Poe explored obsessively in poems like “Annabel Lee” and “Lenore”; and the inexorable movement toward catastrophe that defines tales like “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The formal structure, iambic pentameter in quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme, echoes Poe’s insistence on musicality and mathematical precision in verse. Most essentially, the poem attempts to capture what Poe called “the death of a beautiful woman” as “the most poetical topic in the world,” while centering the tragedy on the one who survives to discover her. The lighthouse keeper, like so many of Poe’s narrators, is both witness and unwitting architect of his own devastation. His vigil, his surrender, and his terrible discovery at dawn are offered in the spirit of a poet who understood that grief is not a moment but a haunting.