The Old Man and the Sea |
Issue 16
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“We had our hands upon an idol of the clouds.” – Euripides
Riddled with lice, the local fishermen were gathering violets when the blind poet appeared, stumbling along the muddy road. Have you milked your snails? he asked the frightened children, draped in purple robes. Viridian waves shuddered over the bleached bones of shipwrecks starred with asteroids, where when the sun goes down the lonely conscience of the moon pulls back its wrack of woe and the ooze of treasures drowned beneath the thousand creases in the forehead of the melancholy sea waits in vain to hear the mermaids singing to the lonely hero’s lonely queen staring through the pearly gates that were her husband’s eyes. Do not box your reader’s ear unless you have a salamander to show him, the rosy-fingered poet whispered to the barnacle goose, alone where it breeds a mushroom from the rotting timber in the briny deep. But the sound he sought could not be ascertained in the belly of the indomitable dark blue waters, the unpathed wind-obeying brine. And so he died, weary and old with measures still unfathomed, treasured into something rich and strange, bard of the tragedy of war, its brutal destruction, loss, and futile suffering, home to an enduring truth of humankind, that we harbor demons of dominance and greed and lustful dreams of glory resistant to the better angels of our nature. |
Robert Witmer has resided in Japan for the past 46 years. His poems have appeared in many print and online journals. He has also published two collections of poetry, Finding a Way (2016) and Serendipity (2023). A third book, Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole, will be published in 2025.
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