Ushuaia I (A critique of Virginia Woolf)

What should I do with you, waves,
you who can never decide whether you’re the first or the last?
You seek to define the coast with your constant fronts,
you think that you can grind it down by incessant coming and going.

You alone know how long the coastline really is;
where land stops, where land begins.
Forever changing the line, the length, the lay, in tandem with the moon -
consistent alone is your inconsistency.

Assured of ultimate victory over the stones and concrete stubble,
you triturate the sands until fine enough for hourglasses and egg-timers;
until they meet the requirements necessary for calibrating time,
until teeth are beyond use for telling the difference between hard and soft.
Victorious, also, in the contest who of us will be the last to fall asleep,
because you never sleep.

Although colourless, you seem blue when the sky is mirrored on your surface,
revealing an ideal course to be strolled upon by a carpenter’s son.
Yet you remain the most changeable element.
When wild and loud and your breakers thunder,
and from the highest peaks of your rollers, from bursting spume and from the lulls,
a hundred thousand voices free themselves;
mine, yours, others I don't recognise,
those that just whisper, and all the others, too.
And in their midst the Nazarene;
forevermore that final wretched hexad:
"Lord! Why have you abandoned me?"

With one foot grapsing at the shifting bed,
I desist, I hold my own, I cry at each single wave:
Are you staying?
Are you staying?
Are you staying?
Or what?