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Title: To The Sea
Author: Cale Young Rice [
More Titles by Rice]
Are you enraged, O sea, with the blue peace
Of heaven, so to uplift your armied waves,
Your billowy rebellion against its ease,
And with Tartarean mutter from cold caves,
From shuddering profundities where shapes
Of awe glide thro entangled leagues of ooze,
To hoot your watery omens evermore,
And evermore your moanings interfuse
With seething necromancy and mad lore?
Or do you labour with the drifting bones
Of countless dead, O mighty Alchemist,
Within whose stormy crucible the stones
Of sunk primordial shores, granite and schist,
Are crumbled by your all-abrasive beat?
With immemorial chanting to the moon,
And cosmic incantation, do you crave
Rest to be found not till your wilds are strewn
Frigid and desert over earth's last grave?
You seem drunk with immensity, mad, blind--
With raving deaf, with wandering forlorn,
Parent of Demogorgon whose dire mind
Is night and earthquake, shapeless shame and scorn
Of the o'ermounting birth of Harmony.
Bound in your briny bed and gnawing earth
With foamy writhing and fierce-panted tides,
You are as Fate in torment of a dearth
Of black disaster and destruction's strides.
And how you shatter silence from the world,
Incarnate Motion of all mystery!
Whose waves are fury-wings, whose winds are hurled
Whither your Ghost tempestuous can see
A desolate apocalypse of death.
Yea, how you shatter silence from the world,
With emerald overflowing, waste on waste
Of flashing susurration, dashed and swirled
On isles and continents that shrink abased!
And yet, O veering veil of the Unknown,
Gathered from primal mist and firmament;
O surging shape of Life's unfathomed moan,
Whelming humanity with fears unmeant;
Yet do I love you, far above all fear,
And loving you unconquerably trust
The runes that from your ageless surfing start
Would read, were they revealed, gust upon gust,
That Immortality is might of heart!
[The end]
Cale Young Rice's poem: To The Sea
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