Welcome to 31 Days of Poetry & Writing Prompts–Day 7.

Young Sea

by Carl Sandburg

The sea is never still.

It pounds on the shore

Restless as a young heart,

Hunting.

The sea speaks

And only the stormy hearts

Know what it says:

It is the face of a rough mother speaking.

The sea is young.

One storm cleans all the hoar

And loosens the age of it.

I hear it laughing, reckless.

They love the sea,

Men who ride on it

And know they will die

Under the salt of it.

Let only the young come,

Says the sea.

Let them kiss my face

And hear me.

I am the last word

And I tell

Where storms and stars come from.

///////////

Standing at the seashore, I realize there are things I will never move past in this life.

I will always long to understand, and I never will.

I’m stunned because these liquid waves kept rolling in the whole time I was away.

Two hours up the road, I lived my day after day in another town, and they never stopped arriving at the shore. They charged the coastline like soldiers, circling day after night after day, continuous to fill hours and minutes and seconds.

It’s nothing short of miraculous.

Those waves carried on–energy passing through water, by gravitational pull, by the sun and the moon, by the wind and the Word. It didn’t matter where I was. What I was doing. Whether I was awake or asleep. I had no hand in it.

And that’s nothing short of beautiful.

Standing there, I remembered who keeps the whole big universe rolling. Because despite the above poem, it’s not actually the sea, who gets the last word.

“The Son {Jesus} is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being–sustaining all things by His powerful word.” Hebrews 1:3

He’s sustaining all things–even the wind and the sun and the moon and the gravity and the energy and me and these waves–by His powerful word.

The waves will move, until He tells them to stop. I can pretend to comprehend, but I don’t. It’s so far beyond me.

Standing there, I recognize how little I witness, only one small corner of this coastline. There’s more, so much more, though for a time, I observed only the beauty.

There’s always a flip side, another chaos that won’t resolve. What’s striking might also strike.

“They love the sea, Men who ride on it, And know they will die under the salt of it.”

I remember the terror of standing before the young sea, a Mama of fearless young people, locating and counting all day long. I could never rest then, not at the seashore where the dirty truth always lurked behind this great allure.

The smashing sea might also smash. I can hear it laughing, reckless.