The Ocean has its silent caves, / Deep, quiet, and alone; / Though there be fury on the waves, / Beneath them there is none.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
In crisis with the wind, I am only one creature
who wrestles with dreams and living
fears of losing what is sacred.
Greenhouse gas emissions in my home
absorbed by the dying ocean,
a carbon cycle torn into an unbalanced collage.
A trinity of bones left to collage
the surface of each creature’s
memory, like a wound cut through ocean
waves, a battleground that keeps on living.
Humans have never lived without war. It’s our home.
When will survival become sacred?
If otherness is all that’s left to this sacred
existence, what blood collage
can create a true home?
Monks walking for peace, loving creatures,
who insist on believing, living,
knowing that all were born in the oceans.
Soul songs adrift in unheard oceans
try and float into what we know is sacred
and yet, terror is living
like an abandoned historical collage
where we are the monster-creatures
without a home.
What would happen if, in each other, we found home
and crawled toward it like once from the ocean?
Instead, government bullets kill creatures,
who hold peace sacred
in each other’s hands, in a collage
of freedom for the living?
In these times, when The Caged Bird, banned from living,
sings only in a trusted home,
who will quilt a remembrance collage
made of art locked in an ocean
sized aquarium? Who will play docent to a sacred
past when to live was to love each creature?
I am only one creature in this unholy collage
whose living is like an ocean aflame with hate
who misses her once sacred home.
—
Lisa St. John, a writer living in the Hudson Valley of New York, is the author of Ponderings (Finishing Line), and Swallowing Stones (Kelsay). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Lisa has published her poetry in journals such as Light, The Ekphrastic Review, Glassworks, The Poetry Distillery, and The Orchards. Her awards include Winner of The Poet’s Billow Bermuda Triangle Contest and first place in Anthology’s 2024 Poetry Award. Please visit her website at www.lisachristinastjohn.com.
