The ocean, consume me.
I hear your call to me like a mother cow to her calf,
A low drawling echo that grows with the hour.
Or the calf to its mother,
you call me home
to suckle on my breast where in it my heart beats.
Drum, drum.
Be still the drums.
Laying deep in dark abyss.
The drums, the drums.
I smell the salty air
It haunts my passage, staining my dress
with crusted, crystallised foam.
Will this heart ne'er be clean?
To be filthied by shame, now unworthy to him
by the sea and what it has done to me.
I wait for you.
You growing pains, you. You wisdom teeth pushing through.
The dust settles in my candle light.
The little white flecks fall together like prancing dandelion seeds
as fragile as children who have been wasted in your hands like white gold,
thrown away.
What they could have been had they fallen to my hands.
Rosey and blue-eyed with marjoram soft hair.
So I wait, breath now freezing with the in and out
steadying as the tide rises.
It calls me to consume me.
Dare I step to it? Submerse my feet within the waves.
One more hour, one more day - tick, tock, tick, tock.
But what if this hour he comes my way?
Descending from heaven, knocking at my gate.
The crash of the ocean against my hull.
Wait, wait, for my life and forever, I will wait.
The ocean, consume me.
A response to Sir John Everett Millais's 1851 painting 'Mariana', Inspired by Alfred Tennyson's 1830 poem 'Mariana' "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!"