Produced by Dennis Camire
This week’s poem is by Marita O’Neill of Portland. O’Neill teaches English at Yarmouth High School.
In the Wild Seas
By Marita O’Neill
From the El Faro cargo ship,
A last message at midnight—husband to wife,
Bad weather ahead.
That Sunday just before dawn
It woke us, a half-dream cry,
Through thick winter windows
Over and over
A cry from another world, a cry—
Not coyote, not child—
That unsettled me enough to rise
And trace the sound
To the river behind the house
Where a loon, all voluminous
Bone and feather,
Had trapped itself in the low-tide mud
While the river’s retreating ribbon
Shimmered over a mile away.
Something broods behind
The mother’s words: I blame the company
Who sent them to the hurricane.
Its neck like a muscular forearm
Arched and rocked; its wings
Splayed in the mud, trying to gain ground,
Find the water that disappeared.
A father says,
I blame the hurricane, the wind, the sea.
I debated what was worse: hold its wild
Body in my arms, flailing and biting
To the river’s path
Or wait and watch,
Hoping the bird would thrust its way
To water, to the known
On its clumsy, dumb wings.
When the waters calmed, they found its
Prodigious hull crushed like a can: a life-
Boat mangled, cargo vanished, cabins blown
25 miles from the ship’s body.
In the chaos of wind and wave
There is a cry
For those swallowed in the wild seas
For those mutilated and wingless
And, lastly, a cry
For those who can’t save them.
Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu
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