I keep returning to the sea in my poems. Not as scenery, but as a force. The ocean holds its own kind of memory: heavy, salt-stained, patient. It takes what we drop. It keeps what we try to forget. And sometimes, when it feels like it, it returns something to the shore — changed.
These three poems form a small sequence: first the sinking, then the burial, then the fragments that come back.
Undercurrent
I sink, breathless,
breaking through a glass-like sea.
My ribs echo — soft —
drifting down through silent waves,
carried by the undercurrent.
Some losses don’t float. They sink — and become legend.
The Sunken Letter
Guarded by stone,
a sunken treasure rests,
hidden beneath kelp woods,
in the embrace of the waves.
The outline of whales
lingers above—
their voices deep,
cascading sound.
But the light from the surface
cannot reach its grave.
No current moves
the letter on the ocean floor,
where only silence prevails.
And sometimes the sea returns what it kept — not whole, but altered.
What the Ocean Left Behind
Rust blooms on the frame
you left in the sand,
glass cracked between stones
and wreckage
on the shore.
The shards reflect
the setting sun,
lulled by waves
under cloud.
I pick up a piece,
washed up by the tide,
smoothed by the salt
of the sea.
Of the statue we built,
only fragments remain —
a photo of us,
cracked behind seaweed strands.
Your mouth still half-laughing
under salt and glass.
I think part of why I love writing about the ocean is that it refuses clean endings. It doesn’t give you closure — it gives you remnants. It gives you proof that something existed, and that time did what time does.
Have you ever had a place that kept a piece of your story? Something you can’t return to without feeling the old current tug? I’d love to hear about it.
Related post: Poems Inspired by Water: Change and Memory
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