Tuesday 28 February 2017

LOSING THE AGE OF PISCES - A Poem

TALKING ABOUT THE SEA,   Only twice have I lived more than an easy walking distance to the sea and though I had water around me in other forms there ( a river with a dam on it, or fish tanks ) I always felt dehydrated. So here is yet another sea poem from my book Words over the Water.








Losing the Age of Pisces.


As poets we wake and know we’ve heard the sea
in its loneliness reach out and into our dreams,

but its language cries out in the ozone words
of some unknown tongue – we try to find our way
back down through the fathoms of speech to hear

what the sea repeatedly says and wants us to hear:

the sea: wiffling tide-tales into mangroves and sedges
the sea: pulsing old wisdoms up inlets and canals
the sea: slapping wordy rhythms onto speeding hulls
the sea: beating out phrases onto rocks and sand

but even poets can’t reach into the language of sea;
yet we know on obscure coasts, sea-words are held
in the Methuselah tongues which are dying. Dying

and maybe already erased, by the world take-over

with an English language full of policy and commerce
which has no words to give the sea speech – it cannot
conceive of the surrounding sea being a crouching god

that speaks - nor care, how it strikes the sea dumb
with its ignorance. Our oceans shrunk to two words,

‘The Sea.’

People crowd to the cities. They fear the unknown.

No sea-words known for the man to name the feeling
of loss and sadness, which linger past ‘the little death,’
when the release of his inner sea is gifted over to her.

No sea-words known for the woman to name the depth
of grief, which lingers on when the amniotic sea
she carried within is lost as her sea-child is born.

The sea left speechless, circling our land in vain.
The sea left speechless, entwined in our DNA.

And the sea-tears fall alive from the people - the proof
the sea lives, always there, as it lifts and lowers tides,
both within them, and without them.

Wordless, the poets stumble on in their agony, urgent

to hear, to learn, to return the sea-words back to the people.

Copyright: lois e hunter.

2 comments:

  1. Oh the sea and the sounds...so important to hear. Love it Lois. Once again you strike the right cord! Thank you. :-) Diana

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