Beyond My Wine Dark Sea

Keeper of fresh air and salt water waves

to lick their wounds and heal them.

I am a body

of water and work

told to be blue,

black, a wine dark sea,

but I am not just an idea.

I am the distortion,

the fragments

of everyone who looks down at me.

Crashing across them, like brushstrokes

from an untrained artist

I have crushed up the world

like carcasses of coral, and used it

to paint my own reality.

The golden hair of my mother

now curled in my finger tips

becomes a tarnished silver,

not like the moon

reflecting off my chest

as she pulls me apart from shore

to shore, but a second place

given out of pity

first goes to my only sister.

My creatures of black and green

with fins and hope

search for a motherland

floating to the surface

only to learn that to find home

means they are a part of something larger.

If I finally find myself

beyond the waves and the water

will everyone see me

for the cheap imitation

I am? I will never be

good enough for everyone I love.