Last night’s full moon, a white-ink well,
overflowed its spill onto the sleeping sea
which woke this morning, seething,
stirred from some disturbing dream,
beneath a smeary blotting-paper sky,
feverishly foamed last evening’s lunar slick
into strokes and curls of cursive scrawl
to scroll across the restless spread,
its warnings rippling to the deckled edge
and cast in scribbled notes upon the shore.
All along the sand the tidal etchings
left by ragged rims of angry waves
with empty, broken shells, dead fish,
seagrass heaps, beached whales—
all traces of the sea’s concern
for its escalating temperature,
for its perilously changing life—
are left unread, trodden on
by countless barefoot soleprints
of heedless people strolling idly, while
the ocean booms its tidings ceaselessly
in reams of rolling ink-frothed waves
like some relentless printing press,
and hurls its diatribe at edging rocks,
throwing white-ink slogans to the sky,
seizes land with raging thrust and drag,
deleting its neglected sand-scrawled messages
then retreats, exhausted, spent,
all its white ink gone; sunk, it seems,
like skeletons of dead bleached coral.