The Breathing Sea Poem by John Beaton
The Breathing Sea
Whale-breath blasts up through the moonlight
in a bubble-net of vapor;
trade-winds catch the spout and droplets
stream through palm baleen on Maui.
Past upcountry jacarandas,
spray condenses to a petal
in the lei that the clouds lay
round the mountainsides of Maui.
Over old volcano vent-pipes,
mothered as within an oyster,
mist impearls—a raindrop rolling
down the gardened gowns of Maui.
Flowed and flumed, it shoots a valley,
slows, and steals into the ocean,
scintillating as the sea-shirr
shawls the birthing grounds of Maui.
Underneath that sheen, lunge-feeders,
filled with krill and Arctic pilchards,
sing of their returning journeys
from the Bering Sea to Maui.
Haleakala's great crater
once shot stars; a living mountain
blows the moisture from its blowhole
to the midnight skies of Maui.
Whale-breath blasts up through the moonlight
in a bubble-net of vapor;
trailing droplets bathe the spoutlet
of a humpback calf in Maui.
It's written in trochaic tetrameter (four beats per line with a DA-da rhythm) . The first two lines read like this:
WHALE-breath BLASTS up THROUGH the MOONlight
IN a BUBble-NET of VApor;
There's no rhyme, but the meter gives it a lilt. In the final line of each four-line stanza, the word "Maui" acts as a refrain.
To echo the cycles of life and water, the last stanza repeats the first, with adaptation in the third and fourth lines to introduce the calf (e.g. just as a "droplet" is a small "drop", the "spout" becomes a "spoutlet") .
This poem has been previously published in "Maui Muses" and "Eyes on BC."
One can almost feel the spray of the whales breathing in a rhythm mirrored in the ocean and indeed the poem. I enjoyed the journey of the breath and seeing where the vapour went and its effect on the world, great idea. Very well crafted and thought out.
Thanks for following the circle of the breath, Clive. Glad you enjoyed it.
John, such a wonderful poem.............10+++++++++++++++
Sea is breathing amazingly and rhythm of breath is perceived from this brilliantly penned poem...10
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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4/26/2024 11:08:12 AM # 1.0.0.1119
Love this stanza... Underneath that sheen, lunge-feeders, filled with krill and Arctic pilchards, sing of their returning journeys from the Bering Sea to Maui.