by Michael Lydon
Everything is water
if you look long enough.-Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley’s two spare and simple lines achieve an enviable eloquence that has moved me ever since I first read them some forty years ago. Everything is water, declares the poet, and I agree. If life can promise us anything, it is that it will always be fluid, always changing. Whenever I read Creeley’s poem, I feel encouraged to look again and again at the world around me until I can see and feel the surge of life’s fluidity around me: ocean waves rolling endlessly to shore, new baby leaves shimmering in a springtime breeze, the moon’s endless waxing and waning from crescent to full and from full to crescent again. To sense the eternity of motion and the motion of eternity—that’s the goal of many hopeful meditations.
Much to my delight, you Write the Worlders have responded to this prompt on just this thoughtful level. From timtam.9 in Australia: “I feel the ghosts of energy, surging me to sleep”:
The bed moves in waves and waters, always catching me,
My throat scratches from screams and gasps, a salty memory,
My limbs dragging out, they’re finally floating free,
I’m blinded by sun, as it’s picture tosses on blue-green,
I hear the colony of seagulls, cry from the Norfolk tree,
I brush off grainy sand.
Take me, dreams,
Take me, land,
And take me, sea.
American Madelyn_Catharine loves to watch how “soft waves crash at my feet like the hearts of those I loved,” and she urges us to:
Watch for the crescent break as it bathes everything you knew
In washed out blue light
Fall into its pull like a planet to gravity
We were never meant to stay standing forever anyway
In “The Sea Itself,” Raesjr finds the rhythms of the ocean:
The sea crashing against my skin with such great force
Working and learning my every move as a difficult course
The sand gently kissing my toes from the sea below
Ending and ending, while nobody knows
In “Let the Ocean” Hmkeselman encourages us to let the sea do as it pleases:
Follow the darkness, follow the shimmer of reflected light
That carries dreamers and sailors into the night
Fall with the sinners and the shipwrecks
Dragged into the depths
Swim with the pooling silver beneath the moon
Coat your skin in the waves metallic, melodious, tune
Sasha Solaire makes much the same point in her “Language of the Sea”:
The salt-breath of the wind
whispering secrets
only the sea can understand
I long to decipher
the poetry of the waves
so that i
can thrust myself into the sea
and know the ocean
waits for me
For DaBolo the ocean is a friend and guide:
I walk about the ocean
Where the ocean-eyes are watching
The ocean is an observer,
watching over me
For the ocean has a mind
The ocean talks through its waves,
that’s why I come here to think
I walk about the sandy beach
Where the ocean is near by
The ocean is a friend,
dancing with me
For the ocean has a rhythm
The ocean moves along by its feet,
that’s why I come here to think
Like several of you Write the Worlders, Starstruck_sailor word-paints the ocean as a living creature—I found myself deeply moved by her acceptance of the ocean’s unfathomable powers:
softly flowing, crashing and raging.
summer breezes, foul winds.
the ocean is unafraid of change.
your footprints do not matter,
even stone will weather down.
water is not fazed by change.
the jagged edges will smooth,
the storms will blow over.
the seas invite change.the tides will turn,
the storms will calm.
Poseidon will laugh again.
the seas will change,
the gales will pass.
the sharp rocks will weather,
until even the memory of their pain is faded.
Starstruck_sailor is not the only contributor to the “Water Body” prompt who has moved me with the excellence of their writing. I do want to be sure you know what fine writers I believe you are turning out to be. Again and again I’ve found myself touched and tickled, amazed and amused, by the clarity, eloquence, and heartfelt insight of your prose and poetry.
The reason for that this month, of course, is in part due to our subject matter, the oceans of our beautiful blue-green planet. When describing our bountiful home in the universe, who could avoid touching their writing with graceful notes of nobility? I urge all of you to work on your writing techniques, on how to build sturdy structures from well-wrought phrases, how to widen your vocabularies and quicken your rhythms, yet as or still more important, I urge you: never forget to open your eyes and ears, hearts and minds, souls and spirits to the beauty of our mysteriously magnificent world. Remember, look long enough and you’ll see that everything (including you!) is ever changing, just like water.
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About Michael Lydon
Michael Lydon is a writer and musician who lives in New York City. Author of many books, among them Rock Folk, Boogie Lightning, Ray Charles: Man and Music, and Writing and Life. A founding editor of Rolling Stone, Lydon has written for many periodicals as well, the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, and Village Voice.
He is also a songwriter and playwright and, with Ellen Mandel, has composed an opera, Passion in Pigskin. A Yale graduate, Lydon is a member of ASCAP, AFofM local 802, and on the faculty of St. John’s University.