Produced by Dennis Camire

This week’s poem is by Marita O’Neill of Portland. O’Neill teaches English at Yarmouth High School.

 

In the Wild Seas

By Marita O’Neill

 

From the El Faro cargo ship,

A last message at midnight—husband to wife,

Bad weather ahead.

 

That Sunday just before dawn

It woke us, a half-dream cry,

Through thick winter windows

Over and over

A cry from another world, a cry—

Not coyote, not child—

That unsettled me enough to rise

And trace the sound

To the river behind the house

Where a loon, all voluminous

Bone and feather,

Had trapped itself in the low-tide mud

While the river’s retreating ribbon

Shimmered over a mile away.

 

Something broods behind

The mother’s words: I blame the company

Who sent them to the hurricane.

 

Its neck like a muscular forearm

Arched and rocked; its wings

Splayed in the mud, trying to gain ground,

Find the water that disappeared.

 

A father says,

I blame the hurricane, the wind, the sea.

 

I debated what was worse: hold its wild

Body in my arms, flailing and biting

To the river’s path

Or wait and watch,

Hoping the bird would thrust its way

To water, to the known

On its clumsy, dumb wings.

 

When the waters calmed, they found its

Prodigious hull crushed like a can: a life-

Boat mangled, cargo vanished, cabins blown

25 miles from the ship’s body.

 

In the chaos of wind and wave

There is a cry

For those swallowed in the wild seas

For those mutilated and wingless

And, lastly, a cry

For those who can’t save them.

 

Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu

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