SEEING THE OCEAN FOR THE FIRST TIME
A boy first saw the ocean
When he was six, the Cement Ship.
He saw where the sky met the sea,
The ocean introduced to the shore:
Near Seacliff, Santa Cruz,
And the San Andreas Fault.
The wreckage of the Cement Ship,
The S.S. Palo Alto, stern upended.
No more a port of call for the birds,
Not accessible to human beings.
The sea, that first time,
Was a prodigious body of green,
Flat with an unbounded horizon,
In a world governed solely by gravity.
When he first realized the immensity,
It was like a god reclining,
Omnipotent, filling every space,
All knowing, always in motion.
Intuition told him: the sea is within us,
We walked out of it, saltwater to headlands.
Stephen Barile is an award-winning poet and 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee from Fresno, California. He attended Fresno Pacific University, and California State University, Fresno. His poems have been anthologized in numerous publications, both print and online. He taught writing at Madera College, and CSU Fresno. Stephen Barile lives in Fresno.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 