| WHEN the sea is everywhere | |
| from horizon to horizon .. | |
| when the salt and blue | |
| fill a circle of horizons .. | |
| I swear again how I know | 5 |
| the sea is older than anything else | |
| and the sea younger than anything else. | |
| |
| My first father was a landsman. | |
| My tenth father was a sea-lover, | |
| a gipsy sea-boy, a singer of chanties. | 10 |
| (Oh Blow the Man Down!) | |
| |
| The sea is always the same: | |
| and yet the sea always changes. | |
| |
| The sea gives all, | |
| and yet the sea keeps something back. | 15 |
| |
| The sea takes without asking. | |
| The sea is a worker, a thief and a loafer. | |
| Why does the sea let go so slow? | |
| Or never let go at all? | |
| |
| The sea always the same | 20 |
| day after day, | |
| the sea always the same | |
| night after night, | |
| fog on fog and never a star, | |
| wind on wind and running white sheets, | 25 |
| bird on bird always a sea-bird— | |
| so the days get lost: | |
| it is neither Saturday nor Monday, | |
| it is any day or no day, | |
| it is a year, ten years. | 30 |
| |
| Fog on fog and never a star, | |
| what is a man, a child, a woman, | |
| to the green and grinding sea? | |
| The ropes and boards squeak and groan. | |
| |
| On the land they know a child they have named Today. | 35 |
| On the sea they know three children they have named: | |
| Yesterday, Today, To-morrow. | |
| |
| I made a song to a woman:—it ran: | |
| I have wanted you. | |
| I have called to you | 40 |
| on a day I counted a thousand years. | |
| |
| In the deep of a sea-blue noon | |
| many women run in a man’s head, | |
| phantom women leaping from a man’s forehead | |
| .. to the railings … into the sea … to the | 45 |
| sea rim … | |
| .. a man’s mother … a man’s wife … other | |
| women … | |
| |
| I asked a sure-footed sailor how and he said: | |
| I have known many women but there is only one sea. | 50 |
| I saw the North Star once | |
| and our old friend, The Big Dipper, | |
| only the sea between us: | |
| “Take away the sea | |
| and I lift The Dipper, | 55 |
| swing the handle of it, | |
| drink from the brim of it.” | |
| |
| I saw the North Star one night | |
| and five new stars for me in the rigging ropes, | |
| and seven old stars in the cross of the wireless | 60 |
| plunging by night, | |
| plowing by night— | |
| Five new cool stars, seven old warm stars. | |
| |
| I have been let down in a thousand graves by my kinfolk. | |
| I have been left alone with the sea and the sea’s wife, the wind, for my last friends | 65 |
| And my kinfolk never knew anything about it at all. | |
| |
| Salt from an old work of eating our graveclothes is here. | |
| The sea-kin of my thousand graves, | |
| The sea and the sea’s wife, the wind, | |
| They are all here to-night | 70 |
| between the circle of horizons, | |
| between the cross of the wireless | |
| and the seven old warm stars. | |
| |
| Out of a thousand sea-holes I came yesterday. | |
| Out of a thousand sea-holes I come to-morrow. | 75 |
| |
| I am kin of the changer. | |
| I am a son of the sea | |
| and the sea’s wife, the wind. | |
