"Do not long for lullabies in the breakers . . ."

 

I wrote these two poems in Uruguay in 2011 several months after my mother's death on her 81st birthday. The poems were first published in Angle Poetry Journal, Volume 1, Issue 1, Summer 2012, and subsequently in my second full-length collection, Glad and Sorry Seasons (Biblioasis, 2014). 

Why did I choose Achelois for my second poem?  Click HERE to find out. The end-rhyme of "The Dawning" also provides a clue.

God-willing, in ten days I'll be back in my home by the South Atlantic.

Two Poems of the Sea

I.                  The Dawning

 

The sea, relentless in her give-and-take,

her rising, falling waves that seem to make

amends in silence just before they break

ashore, reflects the instant I awake —

 

a moment of reprieve, when every snake

I realize is fantasy or fake;

when life’s a bowl of cherries. Piece of cake.

(There must have been some terrible mistake . . .)

 

And then the crash. The undertow. The ache.

 

 

 

II.               To a Minor Goddess

 

Wave on wave all heaving and arch and spillage;

blue and green and grey overlaid with silver.

Christmas Day — my saviour the South Atlantic.

            Triumph. Surrender.

           

All my gods have failed me, yet Achelois,

you have watched me wavering in the billows;

you have heard me weeping the wail of seagulls,

            and you have answered:

 

Do not look for eyes in the dancing diamonds;

do not long for lullabies in the breakers;

do not lend more tears to the salt of oceans’

             flotsam and jetsam.

 

Listen for the crash. See the string of seafoam

lace that hems the sand with a hush and whisper.

Silence. Nothing. Everything. Constellations.

            Guardian angels.