6 May 2018

The grave does not compromise.
Its mouth opes oracularly,
speaking certainties, speaking
truths.  The grave
does not deceive.  Who have
gone before would tell you
as much, save that they have
lost their voices
to the wind that wails
round the tombstones.
Makes beds of wailing, does the wind,
in which the dead are made
love to by loss.  It is the wailing
of a sea wind blown ashore,
a wind lost in a too solid
world.  The liquid sea digs
a more fluid grave.  The oracle
parses the cryptic.  The dead
have more room to stretch.  They return
to their amphibian roots, their bodies
become fishes the earth cannot
consume.  Rowers know this innately.
They are fish out of water on land.
In the end, rowers die to be
born anew in the ever-moving
sea.

Philip Kuepper
(16 January 2018)