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Had Ocean Been My Confidant
by Naseer Ahmed Nasir
Had ocean been my confidant
I’d have given it
All of my truths for safekeeping
Tales i would have written
Of seashells picking girls on beaches
Whose golden bodies were
Like isles of dreamland
But whose fates were
Like lines drawn in sand.
Had ocean been my confidant
I’d have given it
All my loneliness
I’d have walked with the wind
Clasping its finger in my fist
On distant paths
From whence no one comes back!
Had ocean been my confidant
I’d have given it all my depths
Stepping into its limitless
Blue bosom
I’d have made earth into my bark
Sky into my sails
I’d have made the woeful moment
Of separation
A connecting link between you and me.
Had ocean been my confidant!
The Wide Ocean
by Pablo Neruda
Ocean, if you were to give, a measure, a ferment, a fruit
of your gifts and destructions, into my hand,
I would choose your far-off repose, your contour of steel,
your vigilant spaces of air and darkness,
and the power of your white tongue,
that shatters and overthrows columns,
breaking them down to your proper purity.
Not the final breaker, heavy with brine,
that thunders onshore, and creates
the silence of sand, that encircles the world,
but the inner spaces of force,
the naked power of the waters,
the immoveable solitude, brimming with lives.
It is Time perhaps, or the vessel filled
with all motion, pure Oneness,
that death cannot touch, the visceral green
of consuming totality.
Only a salt kiss remains of the drowned arm,
that lifts a spray: a humid scent,
of the damp flower, is left,
from the bodies of men. Your energies
form, in a trickle that is not spent,
form, in retreat into silence.
The falling wave,
arch of identity, shattering feathers,
is only spume when it clears,
and returns to its source, unconsumed.
Your whole force heads for its origin.
The husks that your load threshes,
are only the crushed, plundered, deliveries,
that your act of abundance expelled,
all those that take life from your branches.
Your form extends beyond breakers,
vibrant, and rhythmic, like the chest, cloaking
a single being, and its breathings,
that lift into the content of light,
plains raised above waves,
forming the naked surface of earth.
You fill your true self with your substance.
You overflow curve with silence.
The vessel trembles with your salt and sweetness,
the universal cavern of waters,
and nothing is lost from you, as it is
from the desolate crater, or the bay of a hill,
those empty heights, signs, scars,
guarding the wounded air.
Your petals throbbing against the Earth,
trembling your submarine harvests,
your menace thickening the smooth swell,
with pulsations and swarming of schools,
and only the thread of the net raises
the dead lightning of fish-scale,
one wounded millimetre, in the space
of your crystal completeness.
An Ocean Within
by Sameer Ahmed
Flourishing on
Natural contours of land,
Variegating with rainbows,
A continuous river
Flows into his own depths,
An ocean within.
This wordsmith, creator
Of enduring friendship
Throughout the seasons
With insects and birds,
Foliage and flowers, his co-creators
Famed among the constellations.
He – an Alpha Arietis – shines
With his art, evergreen.
Nostalgic melodies
Moisten his eyes.
The smile of a child
Makes him burst into laughter.
He soaks up
The sorrows unsaid
And faces unread.
A self-contained emotinal being.
He puts his signature
On the tablet of wind
Whispering through apertures
Of doors, of cores.
Spreading the magic of affection,
Erasing hatreds from
The slates of mind
And healing wounds
With his balmy libretto,
He consoles the heart.
Though a maverick in
The herds of social climbers,
His deep silence evokes
Wise thoughts.
A translucent rain
Wiping the mist of pain,
He grows
The creepers of camaraderie
In his poetry yards.
His ailing heart,
Varicose legs,
Olden heels
And clay bound feet,
All laborious episodes of
A lifetime drama serial.
Opening new ways
Between conscious and subconscious
My mentor,
Even with increasing age
Holds a bundle of dreams
For me, for all
Death’s arrow is aiming at him – He knows
But, still inscribing
The lively poem of existence
By camouflaging himself in words
beautiful and strong.
I know, he will live
And live long.
The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean
by Robinson Jeffers
Unhappy about some far off things
That are not my affair, wandering
Along the coast and up the lean ridges,
I saw in the evening
The stars go over the lonely ocean,
And a black-maned wild boar
Plowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain.
The old monster snuffled, “Here are sweet roots,
Fat grubs, slick beetles and sprouted acorns.
The best nation in Europe has fallen,
And that is Finland,
But the stars go over the lonely ocean,”
The old black-bristled boar,
Tearing the sod on Mal Paso Mountain.
“The world’s in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean,”
Said the old father of wild pigs,
Plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain.
“Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,”
Said the gamey black-maned boar
Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.
The Ocean
by Victoria Hughes
Upon the crest of a wave I see
hidden memories held within.
New ones created, from every bough
on every ship, that travels bound
for some new pasture.
Such hope and yet such loss,
is the ocean’s promise.
It’s force men think can be tamed.
Yet that is what the ocean
wants you to believe.
It can bite and snap,
or it can be calm and cool.
A million promises made,
and broken upon it’s shores.
A billion memories made
and broken, lying on it’s floors.
The ocean is natures untameable force.
