The Breath of the Sea
by Tanja Stark
She stands in your kitchen
serving fish from the oven
with loaves she found in your empty fridge
( …it begins to hum like an ancient hymn)
the fish quicken within
and swim like the child
you carried inside when wineskins were new
and they’ll nourish your soul
till you dance once again
across rivers and oceans like the wind…
(…a saltwater breeze stirs still curtains)
you leave in a boat
that will crash on the rocks
and wash up on a beach without her
for she’s inside a belly
writing funeral songs
that sound like the breath of the sea
bones ringing with music
sing her back to the shore
where warm fires await her return
(… she who can not be contained)
This time, you’ll feed her
fresh fish you just caught
with the nets she repaired last time ’round.
Tanja Stark
Holy Provision and the Breath of the Sea
This poem is a tender, cryptic, story of life reborn.
Of suburban gothic and the sublime divine.
When I first wrote this last year, I was imagining a holy, mystical figure that comes gently into a kitchen during a time of deep sorrow bringing holy miracles and mysterious provision.
Sophia and the Saint of Tarsus swirling with the Sign of Jonah, conjuring loaves and fishes, like widow’s oil, amidst the carnage of a shipwrecked soul.
If you lean more psychological than spiritual, perhaps another way of reading the poem might be to imagine both women are but one person. We set sail on the open sea filled with hope after a time of barrenness…until we encounter a (psychological) storm that shipwrecks our surface existence.
In this narrative, the descent into the body of the whale could represent the Dark Night of the Soul as we lay washed up on a beach. Below our soul sings funeral songs, mourning our old life. And yet, as the whale’s bones start to ring with music, it brings forth a rebirth that allows us to reconnect with our deeper, tender spiritual self together on the beach.
Or maybe its not the whales bones ringing, but you calling to yourself from the shore?
And then perhaps on another level, it’s a poem of witness, of how our friends and communities can nourish each other through our dark times, each experiencing life’s mysterious rhythm of parallel journeys of caring and healing.
The internal journey moves into an expansive one.
And then last night, I had a curious thought. I wondered, in the midst of this very feminine poem, if perhaps the weary one recalling their younger days of carrying children, could also be a Father, and this poem is a story of the rhythms of a struggling relationship?
This reading surprised me…but it almost seems to be in there too.
I guess in some way, it’s all of them.
So tell me…what resonates for you?
Tanja
ps. Im also cross publishing on Substack here: https://tanjastark.substack.com
