(in memory of my father)

When it comes to the sea, we never learn;
It can turn a ship over, crumble cliffs,
And scald a city with its cold, bitter blue.

The mariners of paid order, time splits
Our habits; it loosens the watching moon
And the hell of the sea smothers the air.

It is we who dwell on death, not the sea;
It has no thoughts, it has no gnawed memory,
Only the sulk of its hulking energy.

The fondling waves fool the eager bather,
The playboy’s yacht, the fishing-boat and tanker:
The sea covers man’s commerce and pleasure.

Becalmed, the sea wears the strangest wreckage:
Chapel roofs, school-gates. and gorgeous forests.
On its ancient bed, the drowned cultures rot.

We take to the stillness of the sea, filled
With our water-grabbing dreams and childhood’s gulp
Of its salty liquid at some tourist bay.

If we dwell too deeply, the sea’s horrors
Anchor down each fathomed thought heavily;
For there is nowhere for the sea to go

But over the waiting land, the planned dreams,
The great schemes of centuries and histories,
Drowning humankind in a second Flood.

Peter Thabit Jones © 2016

Published in THE LIZARD CATCHERS by Peter Thabit Jones, 2006