Perils Of The Open Sea Poem by Max Reif

Every Odysseus-of-us,
sailing home to our own Ithaca
must surely succumb, it seems,
to the whirlpools and traps of the journey
across life's perilous oean
in consciousness' small boat.

An eye-blink of relative peace
freed from one entrapment
not yet ensnared by the next,
is the best most humans can hope for,

or maybe imprisonment
by a fairly benign captor
within or outside us,
instead of a vicious sadist.

I've seen a few mighty heroes
meet the open sea's perils
by raising a powerful hand
and uttering Sacred Names
that turned the dragons away
like frightened, yelping pups —

But that has not
been my fate.