This expanse, our
planet’s ‘blue lung’; is a wondrous monster teeming with other monsters beyond
our imaginings. It is now a cancerous and dying drop that once reared
civilizations and their brutal aims. Carried slave ships and became a burial
cloak for ancestries of numerous generations, but still a beauty that astounds
even sailors who obsessively traverse its channels and tides. This daunting
majesty of nature’s exuberance endowed with life, remains an inertial entity
with a frightful gait, home to nightmares for children who had never set foot
or toe in its mass. We fear it, other worship it, yet its allure has seen man
build vast cities at its edges and surfers battle its insurmountable waves. It
was once sacred to many nations of antiquity, yet today, after years of its
exploitation it has brewed storms and acidic climes that threaten all life on
the planet.
A mystery to poets who
claimed leagues beneath its boulders, and others who sought dead lessons
muddied by its salty grasp.
This is the ocean, a destination
of leisure for the privileged and a sewer dump for the self-same decrepit
minions that feel it deserves no respect for its dainties.
I sadly cannot swim,
but I have dipped my soul drunken from its pull and saw my minute stature
before its gaze. Yet, I am forever enthralled by its rise and fall, the moon’s
magic resonant with its laps around our sordid world.
But what have we done
to it as a people with deft demands for living?
We have hunted its
lot, the whales and fishes that call it home.
Guided by the
languages of our judgements, we deemed the ocean our basket of treasure and
taxed its worth at what we now call the pitch of our excellence, never mindful
of the purpose of its existence. Religions called the earth once formless,
because it was the earth of old and for concern of its plasticity we never
abstained from its shores.
It knit our nations
into a single rock, dared to lift us above its vegetation and spawn, but we
crawled from its womb never mindful of its age and wisdom.
We, the instigators of
all forms of baseness instructed not in temperance and self-restraint deserve
its chastisement, judged by the Gods who reside fixed in its quarters.
We should taste the
swords of its aging service now that global warming has depleted its heart and
marrow, and the ranks of man must tumble under its raging discipline.
As we know no plainer
way of living, this gluttonous race must hunger henceforth, so our splendid
robes shall never hide our poisonous bellies. The ocean is sick, yes, and we
children of excess and arrogance should starve for our tyranny.
Headlong down the
final precipice of our doom we should fall, for our fancies are perilous to
existence on these mothering waters. Our courage to intrude even the depths of
life has yielded this demise, yes; and our inferiority must be laid bare in the
face a frenzied extinction we have caused for many life forms that shared the
spoils of the ocean with us.
And yet these glossed
eyes of indifference has us seeing the beauty of the waves, serene and
swelling, boat of our conquest wading the blue; and we seem to forget the
carcases buried beneath squandered by our mighty arms and rage at all thing
living.
Will each day we also
die, perhaps to become the weeds tangled about boulders and sharp rocks which
will forever remain monuments of this befouled ancestor.
We delude ourselves
and swim in the mess of excrement, swallowing gulps at heights of summer; and
yes, it is beautiful. The veils our eyes have become to the horrors we baked
convince us that all is well in this giant well of time’s mastery.
But there is death in
this tomb, thus perhaps each never thinks of death until we glare at its
sceptre rising above our frail bodies. This journey, this lie is but the cover
of mistakes and pomp we possess.
Footprints of our
frenzy carve memories of death within this immense graveyard, the natural world
subdued by our lust.
And the ocean dies
with each trip, each sail stretching, each roaring engine and the oils sucked
from beneath its pressured breaths.
Images by: Khahliso Matela
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