Mare Nostrum

I am the mother ocean
washing over you,
spilling unstintingly,
a wave inexorable,
I crash against you,
knocking you down,
too heavy, too heady,
pulling you deeper than
you ever meant to go,
I break myself against your body
until you yield
or drag yourself
to dry land you imagine safer.
I swallow your poison
and hold your dead to my bosom
so that you may let them go.
I comfort you with my eternity,
cradle you within my infinity.
What is sharp and vicious, I smooth.
Where you ache, I fill in the emptiness.
What is stone, I turn to sand for you to shape
with your bare, unpracticed hands.
I quench thirsts you cannot even admit,
pouring into you even when there has been
no rain.
Ebb and flow.
Ebb and ebb
and ebb.
And on nights like this,
when even the moon has left me,
I rock myself,
for who can hold the sea?