A poem I wrote in the spring of 2018… The inspiration being the news about what is happening to our ocean life and my innate knowledge that all life has and all lives have a song.
* * * * *
The sound of the waves is a lullaby
to me reclining on the sand of the shore.
“Shhh-ahh, shhh-ahh, shhh-ahh”
whisper-sings the ocean mother.
I wonder that the clouds in this bluest sky
set the tempo of these waters
that flow with the earth’s spinning rhythm.
Do these waves mask the tunes
of the whales’ poignant aria of loss and death,
telling the anguish of suffocation in
the plastic detritus and metallic poisons of two-legged land creatures?
Is there singing in the sea?
Do the dolphins recit of love
in their joyful darting dances in and out of the waves?
Or of fear and pain when caught in the fisher’s net or
when smothered by the fume of a boat’s exhaust?
Is there singing in the sea?
Do the bleached corals, blanched by the heat of humanity’s hubris,
croak in raspy gasps for air?
Do the anemone yet hum a swirly melody of the flow of life and death
as they gently entrap their tiny prey?
Is there singing in the sea?
Down in the dark, dark depths
where the weight of water and the near absence of light
is belied by the insistent beauty of life in thermal streams,
do strangely formed beings sing a pungent bacterial lay of survival,
a deep booming ostinato of “then, now, and evermore”?
Is there singing in the sea?
I walk along the strand and count my steps to the
ebb and flow,
ebb and flow,
ebb and flow
of ever-moving tides.
Seals, resting on rocks and sandbars,
mouthe a pulsing monophony of moaning tones
as they warm themselves in the sun
while waves lap at them in slow deliberate time.
I sing along with their cantata
“ah-roo, ah-roo, ah-roo”.
I pick up the lone nautilus and hold it to my ear.
I hear a soft soothing breathing.
I ask silently of the shell,
“Is there singing in the sea?”
She replies in a quiet
“phffff, phffff; phffff, phffff”
insisting that as long as there is
sky and cloud
wind and water
seal and sun
rock and amoeba
sand and starfish
shell and crab
storm and wave
fish and fathom
shark and cod
predator and prey
whale and narwhal
signal and echo
dolphin and dance
turtle and current
thermal and geyser
there shall be singing in the sea–
but only if the two-legged land creature
learns to sing along.
The Muses of Happiness 