The Ocean is Angry
The ocean is angry—
It’s in their faces as they gaze & marvel
on West Cliff, braced against a hard wind—
It’s 1998, and the weather has gotten serious.
The ocean is angry—
I catch a whisper among the many who come
in this break in the rain.
This is the rage of El Niño—Christ child of Nature—
and we all know how prophecies have long warned
of Divine wrath.
It’s easy to see it this way—
The ceaseless rolling & churning, a roiling, littoral lava,
volcanic violent surf,
its fiery white wave crests thrust madly into the air,
spending themselves in fury.
No serene order of Nature here, but berserk battering force,
the butting of heads, the lashing of immense oceanic whips
against solid cliff rock, a ferocity the human body
can hardly comprehend.
Sections of matchstick fence had faced it, now splintered in pieces;
and sidewalk asphalt was tossed & broken up like slate fractured;
slathered over parking spaces are silt & stones,
and not a bird in sight.
However they try, their white teeth snapping,
the waves cannot reach us, we stand back sensibly,
but the briny spray blows at us, our faces moist with it,
lips taste sea, and the sea howls.
Ceaseless, restless, white water foams below us,
whirlpools of vertigo among spaces of the wave-chiselled
outcroppings of rock.
The dark gray of further surf is all over laced by telltale
white-branching veins of stormy agitation.
Across the sky, there is layer upon layer of darker,
meaner cloud.
Let us hope we are wrong in our human feeling.
Let us hope Nature does not intend more.
For this, otherwise, is only prelude.
February 1998