These Swells Are Fierce

You think like the waves
Gilded and yet guided by a lunar glow,
Humming, pushing, and returning
Further along the line of your bodies shifting shore.
Striving at times to dash yourself upon the rocks
While hoping for a little more life,
Wanting to know if the small pools are different (and right)
In their comfortable and compact way,
Or if you truly must seek a foreign coast.

We move in this continual crest,
encroaching on time through land poached
returning it only at tides end.
And we are drawn out (or swim) with each one knocking
Around our bodies, through our thoughts, against each breath
The drumming is in our ears, and pressure builds.
Hold on and drift below,
Anchors on heels, finger tips trailing through brine.
Absolute silence encompasses; the sovereign sound.
Our hands steadfast, the question begs:
“Can we rise?”
I promised you this already twice before;
We have life left in us yet.
You move as if to float from me, but I remain
As if to claim through sheer tenacity:
“It’s hard to see clearly down here”
Kicking off from the silt you choose not to swim
and rather than leave you and your dire whim
I reach below and pull you abreast,
To be carried—with me—in the current,
Relax into the knowledge of depth and calm,
Relief is a release of its own.

We rise much like timeless tides,
And though we often sink
Beneath pools of varied horizons,
Our strength matures on the dive.
It’s at the ridges of these chasms we find,
Upon each ocean floor, mirrors in which I just see you
And you just see me
We see what otherwise couldn’t have been
Had it not been for the ponderous pressure above, on shore.
We see it, and new possibility, nothing more,
There is naught else to be found so low.
We must rise, difficult and weary
Through the obscurity of jet and quiet.
Higher up into tourmaline
The luster of our lives begins to refract
And we break the surface to greet an amaranthine sky.

These sempiternal swells are fierce,
But we can learn to laugh at the bite of salt
And how the cold can reek of steel.
I will always promise you fresh air up here,
But you have to be the one to take a breath
And hold it, let it rip through your lungs
Ballast your spirit then send you out into the same seas again,
Afloat on a torrent of bewilderment and awe.

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Author: Mallory Turner

Editor: Emily Bartran

Photo: Hamed Saber/Flickr