Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

Ripped in the Tide

The current out from under

The sailor tending the boat and watching the

bolstering waves crash into foam

The bubbles of a cracked open can

The waves of ethanol in the red bucket

A sailor’s father who was always drowning in it

The grandfather too

Never emptied his liquid to seek sobriety

Never bereft of inebriation

The scaled tail of the aquatic creature

burrowing beneath the depths of sand

Her hands familiar with the prickling penetration of coral,

the shedding of her parents cracked

open like salt packets on the reef

Upfront, out from under

She was holding her mother in the oyster

Her mother screamed and howled

cried and sobbed for a motor to shackle her insides and

to be buried in the abandoned ship

Marking her in youth, already

familiarized with that ounce of despair

An octopus at infancy

polishing the pearl to replenish the shatter

when the father found agony and chucked it

The fragility cracked from his tentacle

could no longer find traction in holding his baby

mollusk.

Passing it down

Passing it on

The current

the young one instead responsible for the father’s

shatters

The lighthouse which once brightly shone overhead

succumbed to one of withering prosperity

when the lightkeeper unplugged,

stone meeting dusk.

The floorboard creaked with a whimper

as he perished in the vicinity.

And the current,

the next in line,

the lightkeeper’s son

tending it all and bombarded by the

floorboard whimpers to mark the

departure, his solitude.

The current

Out from under

The riptide which wrecks

If only the waves wouldn’t  

crash down to spark

hazardous fibres and

devour the generations. If only

the reefs and the fins weren’t intertwined

with troubling ancestry

The foam that is held in the

strains of DNA

passing through and through

Out from under and

buried deep within each one’s

view of the tumultuous tide.

Photo by Aljoscha Laschgari on Unsplash