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What a strange entity
is the sea; inanimate, yet
teeming with life.
What stories it has to tell:
no less a graveyard of history;
replete with the remains
of those only time remembers.
Save her echoing waves,
her ripples are as silent
as fallen forest trees
when no one is around.
Yet, in dreams of memory,
I hear the ghost voices of
ancestors—ghost voices—
bubbling up out of her depths;
ballooning the warm moonlit night
with echoes of laughter issuing from
the buccal cavities of the jumpers.
At the next full moon, I shall paddle out—
paddle out—and thread the wetness of this
vast watered graveyard and anchor a wreath
of African violets; whispering late prayers to
the forgotten Middle Passage ancestors.
