The Dream Of The Sea Poem by Denise Antoni

The summer shimmers, glitters with promise.
There is so much to glean from the sea.
A clear wave of memory laps
My ankles, deep across the shifting sand
Of childhood. I feel the heat of my small hand
In the grip of your large, cool fingertips,
And the strand of emerald weed that wraps
And slips around our feet.

How we would to go down to the sea. You and me.
I, to learn its whispered secrets,
To pour my own into its mercurial keep;
To hear in dream it's ancient repeat;
Hush now, hush now, hush now; go to sleep.

But some learn young of the worlds'
Forked tongue, and of how the days and years
Can become so long.

The heavy brow of sky
Frowns, and curdles
The dream into sun-drenched dismay.
The season drowns in tears,
As we stand here today, the ghosts of you and me,
Of all those who, in every new passion, or for the same old reason,
Must come down to the sea.


*******

Splashes and curses. Pretending not to hear,
I shriek out instead
My frantic glee. A rainbow tiara
Needles my head. Around us towering fathers,
Limpet children encrusting their necks,
Come racing and surging
From the sea, sometimes in answer to the siren's relentless urging.
Sometimes to the innocence of cigarettes and beer.


********

Fingers prising off the hug, the kiss
Long since chiselled away,
I now throw my growing bulk
On the mercy of the sea, its billowing glass
Rocking my clumsy freight.
Spurning the ring and float of netted hope,
I lie like a stunned fish, belly up.
Bloated with the cargo of the mother's
Enduring wait, a fate already
Replete with the shape of the albatross.


******

The old hulks of you and me, you and me,
Still stand here, stranded here. Abandoned years
Stripped and tripped
And medicated away, all counselled away.

As faithful as the tides,
I surely have wept sufficient tears
To make the sea-levels rise
And wash away these low-lying
Coastal places, exposing the ghost traces
Of those played out childhood fears and joys;
These fair-weather friends, or those fresh
Faced and treacherous boys.


*******

So I'm going to go down to the sea today,
If only on behalf of the others;
The disappointing lovers, the suffering mothers,
The shoals of castaway fathers;
Ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing, to and fro
In the constant buffering.

Now in the swell that swallows me,
The mermaids may soon be allowed to sing to me.
The water soothes and pillows me,
As that old artful seducer promises to keep
With me the secrets of the dream;
Hush now, hush now, hush now; and go to sleep.