Time

Such are the pitiless waves of time, such the deleterious effects of passing, indifferent tempests.

Washed upon ever further shores, among our swamped possessions and general wreckage. A chance to remember that the lighter we fall into the water the better we float, and perhaps more likely to glimpse another dawn, over the sea, cold, shivering, exhausted, but alive.

A long time, in which opening your mouth meant only filling it with salty water, but here you are, coughing, retching, spitting it out… another storm survived. Tomorrow a search along the beach may reveal what else has made it through the squall.

The Song Of The Derelict

Ye have sung me your songs, ye have chanted your rimes
(I scorn your beguiling, O sea!)
Ye fondle me now, but to strike me betimes.
(A treacherous lover, the sea!)
Once I saw as I lay, half-awash in the night
A hull in the gloom -- a quick hail -- and a light
And I lurched o'er to leeward and saved her for spite
From the doom that ye meted to me.

I was sister to `Terrible', seventy-four,
(Yo ho! for the swing of the sea!)
And ye sank her in fathoms a thousand or more
(Alas! for the might of the sea!)
Ye taunt me and sing me her fate for a sign!
What harm can ye wreak more on me or on mine?
Ho braggart! I care not for boasting of thine --
A fig for the wrath of the sea!

Some night to the lee of the land I shall steal,
(Heigh-ho to be home from the sea!)
No pilot but Death at the rudderless wheel,
(None knoweth the harbor as he!)
To lie where the slow tide creeps hither and fro
And the shifting sand laps me around, for I know
That my gallant old crew are in Port long ago --
For ever at peace with the sea!

John McCrae

She's a derelict, and has been floating round, by the look of her, for many a score of years. Look at the shape of her counter, and the bows and cutwater. She's as old as the hills, as you might say, and ought to have gone down to Davy Jones a good while ago. Look at the growths on her, and the thickness of her standing rigging; that's all salt encrustations, I fancy, if you notice the white colour. She's been a small barque; but, don't you see, she's not a yard left aloft. They've all dropped out of the slings; everything rotted away; wonder the standing rigging hasn't gone, too

The derelict

By WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON

from The Red Magazine (1912-dec-01)

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/derelict.htm

Spring Sea, David Ayres

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Kurt Vonnegut

Lovers on Aran

The timeless waves,
bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas
To posess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?
Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves' collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.

Seamus Heaney