Child Dead in Old Seas
Child Dead in Old Seas - meaning Summary
Longing Across Watery Distance
A speaker addresses a lost father, waiting in and through oceanic imagery that merges memory, mourning, and ancestral longing. The sea brings fragments of homeland—drums, savannahs, palm trees—and recollections of childhood that persist despite absence. The tone shifts from searching and listening to a bleak acceptance as bodily and funerary images accumulate, presenting death and generational loss as entwined with watery landscape and inherited grief.
Read Complete AnalysesFather, I wait for you in oceans tides washing pyramids high above my head. Waves, undulating corn rows around my black feet. The heavens shift and stars find holes set new in dark infirmity. My search goes on. Dainty shells on ash-like wrists of debutantes remember you. Childhood's absence has not stilled your voice. My ear listens. You whisper on the watery passage. Deep dirges moan from the belly of the sea and your song floats to me of lost savannahs green and drums. Of palm trees bending woman-like swaying grape-blue children laugh on beaches of sand as white as your bones clean on the foot of long-ago waters. Father. I wait for you wrapped in the entrails of whales. Your blood now blues spume over the rippled surface of our grave.
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