What The Ocean Knows

The Ocean knows what it’s like to lose

To mourn the melancholy buried in her blues

She knows of anchors dropped and never drawn

Of breathless, broken bodies, drifting along

The Ocean hoards the brine-born secrets of the swallowed salt

Seals their silence in her watery vault

She feels the splinters of many a sundered deck

Relishes the sweet-salt taste of a dying breath

She is the judge who sentences stray sailors to their deep-sea deaths

She has kissed the cold lips of those who didn’t make it to shore

She drags their souls to Neptune’s floor

She locks away the keens of long goodbyes

Of drowned deckhands and futile cries

She is an endless tomb of vanished voices

A siren’s log of ruinous choices

Some made in fear, some made in flight

All lost below the sorry night

She drinks from the depths of Grief’s dark well

She casts a divine and deadly spell

The Ocean knows how to take

How to keep

How to cradle like a grieving mother

Rocking her children to their final sleep

But The Ocean is no plundering thief

She gardens beauty and color within her reefs

She knows how to give

How to live

How to return what was lost

How to take the jagged and smooth it into something soft

She knows how to gift life to the dead and make the broken whole again

She’s birthed sea-kings out of more than a thousand fallen men

She knows resurrection in her tides

How seafoam thrives in chaos

How kelp will grow where wreckage lies

The Ocean remembers what mortals forget

That her shores forgive each tide’s regret

She knows that redemption cannot come from holding everything together

But if you let things go

Let them change

They’re bound to wash back better

She knows surrender is not the same as defeat

That revival is where the sky and high waters meet

The Ocean has grieved more than we ever will

But she teaches her waters how to heal, nourish, and fill

No matter which way her tide turns

What’s lost along the ocean floor will always be returned

She’ll keep going

Keep growing

Our Ocean is all-knowing

Even her weeping waves

eventually

learn

to

blot their tears.