At Sea
When he was four months old we moved
his crib from beside our bed
to the tiny study beside the wall
with its National Geographic poster,
World Cetaceans, and for hours
he would stare: high-contrast orca,
lazy blue bottlenose, pink river dolphin.
They seemed to calm his kicking, his colic,
and we laughed and imagined the shapes
and colors of his future, Duke
Marine Lab, Biologist. But at 2 am
when we imagined him sleeping
we’d hear the tinkle of his music box,
pull-cord within the universe
of his grasp: Musician. Insomniac.
Shadows dancing on the wall.
What waits beneath the what-will-be
like eyes fixed upon a whale?
We moved out of that apartment,
the poster torn and thrown away,
later our son blown out to sea, adrift
for years then tossed by storms,
all of us searching hard for some horizon
where perhaps blue dolphins leap.
Bill Griffin is a naturalist and retired family doctor in rural North Carolina. His seven previous books include the ecopoetry collection Snake Den Ridge, a Bestiary (illustrated by Linda French Griffin) in which creatures of the Great Smokies speak their minds and suggest that the dis-ease of our 21st century society could benefit from a dose of interdependence, reciprocity, and gratitude. Bill’s poetry appears in many regional and national publications. He has served as Poet-in-Residence at the North Carolina Zoo and was selected for the inaugural Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont Writer’s Conference, under faculty poet Frank X Walker.
Amethyst Review 