SUNDAY POETRY: "THE SEA HOLD"

(Common loon. Detail from the diorama Diving Birds: Feasting on Newfoundland's Grand Banks in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History. Photo by Wally Gobetz at Flickr.

THE SEA HOLD

by Carl Sandburg

THE SEA is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs an early sunset and a last morning star over the oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land … five white dice rolled from a tube.

Not so long ago … the sea was large…
And to-day the sea has lost nothing … it keeps all.

I am a loon about the sea.
I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I forget so many sea songs and sea cries.

I am a loon about the sea.
So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper shack trembling in a sand storm.

The sea knows more about them than they know themselves.
They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go.

The sea is large.
The sea must know more than any of us. 

(Diorama: Diving Birds: Feasting on Newfoundland's Grand Banks, at the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History.)

SUNDAY POETRY: "FLYING FISH"

  Sunday: The day to indulge a poetry addiction.

Flying Fish

by Carl Sandburg

I have lived in many half-worlds myself... and so I know you.

I leaned at a deck rail watching a monotonous sea, the same circling birds and the same plunge of furrows carved by the plowing keel.

I leaned so... and you fluttered struggling between two waves in the air now... and then under the water and out again... a fish... a bird... a fin thing... a wing thing.

Child of water, child of air, fin thing and wing thing... I have lived in many half-worlds myself... and so I know you.

Photograph of a flying gurnard by Elaine Duigenan