Poetry/Ocean Life
A Return to the Sea
From the sea I came and to the sea I go.
The sea doesn't always call to me. Rather, it's a place for my childhood broken heart to ebb and flow, awash in regret. Drifting on tides of hopes and dreams that were more splashed and dashed on the eroding shore. I would not grow up to appear brilliantly out of the salty depths like Neptune, trident in hand, the tempestuous sea parting in my wake.
I know life could have been more. Things could have turned out differently.
I could have ridden a different wave. But you would have dropped in on me like a tsunami. I’d be bailing out of the ride, feeling unworthy. Unable to make a stand. One more Junkyard Dog washed up on the beach, flopping in the sand like a fish out of water.
I didn’t belong in that place and time. Not your surfer girl, Not your dutiful daughter. Not like everyone else growing up free from the gods of guilt. They were not lost and twisted like me, drowning in obedient parables of joy killing resurrections.
The past grows like unwanted barnacles on my skin. Hard and cracking. I scrape them off, peeling off the fossilized chunks one by one revealing the person I am underneath the parasitic weight. Humbling, crusty, reality. Finding out that all the pain all my naive, selfish mistakes and the lessons learned have created the older, land walking version of me.
One day, maybe I will grow fins and scales and return like a mermaid. Part sea, part me. Human. Owning all of my history. My family sacrificed their lives in service to the sea. My blood sprang from the blood of those drowned, the essence of their lives now part of the endless, microscopic glass and shell crushed on the shore. Sweat and tears poured out over the love of the ocean and its creatures. Even though my path drifted to collect the stories of my kind. Born a human woman, whose feet also travel on rocks and grass. Wading in the clear baptismal waters of mountain streams flowing gently from inland springs. Learning there is a world beyond what I was led to believe. Knowing now, I can be more. And if you will not give me the chance to show you, I will still reclaim my version of my heritage. I will plant my feet firmly in the clay beneath the shifting and moving ocean sands that carry the beaches, haphazardly, from one shoreline to another. I will emerge. An older and wiser Mother Ocean, not afraid of Neptune’s reign.
Merr Gumm March 29th, 2024
Thanks to Jonny Masters for this poetry prompt in Poetry Playground.
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