Watery Roots
2020, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Though Homer wrought the sea wine-red, no blood had stained his hands,
for fishermen and sailors both sought just to meet demands.
Each fish hooked then was for good cause, none rotted on the shelf,
for ‘neath the waves, the man who ruled, was kin to Zeus himself.
Soon Romans praised aquatic life on walls with patterns tiled,
and thus that wrathful ocean god upon their navy smiled.
Five thousand miles to the east another people told
the tale of a girl whose father tried to have her sold;
she leapt into the Yangtze waves despite a blowing gale
but lived again as the baiji, protecting those who sail.
Concurrently, far to the west, in “undiscovered” lands,
Americans sung that the Earth upon a turtle stands.
In ancient Norway, Polynesia, India, Japan,
the sea was feared and respected but fared by ancient man.
A faster way to travel and a spring of food and life,
the salty waters also were a fount of death and strife.
But that was in a different age, an age of sails and oars,
when those departing well-known lands might never meet new shores.
For almost six millennia, we crafted hull and keel
with wood, until, not long ago, we tempered those with steel.
Though Mother Nature, still the fervent, pitched and rolled the seas,
no longer could she pull ships down or capsize them with ease.
As mankind learned to brave the waves with newfound iron faith,
the ocean’s once respected wrath faded to but a wraith.
The Goddess of the Yangtze, Neptune, Turtle of the Earth
all fade and take along with them the only things of worth.
Like we forget the countless river, sea, and ocean tales
we leave behind all water dwellers, fishes, squids, and whales.
In bringing ruin to the oceans we ourselves condemn;
for they can do without us, but we cannot without them.