So perfectly aligned and tender,
Those voices we hear daily from the sea
That could belong as easily to a deadman or bird
As to the sea itself.
We follow them down to the shore
Searching inside the ceramic shells
Scattered on the sand.
Looking between rocks.
In the keels of ships.
Even in our own hearts
With their blue horizons.
We dig up and dig down.
Build castles hoping to coax
Some grand inhabitant.
Stand on the fringes of the tide
Believing in the power between worlds.
But still the sea continues to speak
And we do not know if it is a ghost or god,
Or even if we are listening
To our own precious world
Trying to greet us
With a song.
Seth Jani is the founder and editor-in-chief of Seven CirclePress as well as of the newly-minted EarthSpeak Magazine.
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Holly Rose Review, Heroin Love Songs, Shoots And Vines, Camroc Press Review and Writers' Bloc (Rutgers). He has traveled the country doing extensive conservation work with
various environmental non-profits and currently resides in Seattle, WA.
| "Voices" is a
poem about the ruptured link between ourselves and the world. It is
also the story (though you weren't meant to know it) of a few young
people on the coast of Maine (my home state), exploring the shore on a
particularly strange and windswept day. About how they were taken by
the mystery of the sea and wind as they came together to form an
uproar, and about how these kids decided to do away with the
rational-materialistic interpretation of this phenomenon and instead try to understand it in terms of metaphor, viewing the tumult of the sea not as a mechanistic operation but as a living entity trying to communicate (as we do) with the world around it. It is a poem about believing in the power of the world and giving up the prodding search of the mind to feel instead the presence of some old and essential mystery. |
