THE SNOT-GREEN (WINE-DARK) SEA
The winter-sharp brains of children
Took a turn for the worse,
Suffered an inferiority complex
Caused by all the old men: quick to criticise, slow to help..
Dispersed, triumphant solely in their dreams.
Children running across raging seas danced on the waves.
Such a storm-blessed salty awakening.
They had nothing to regret.
They were children who coped with HIV, nursed their mothers: .
The word ‘atrocity’ was expunged from their dictionary.
Elm trees were caw-caw-cawing with the rooks of old.
Nobody lied, not even the poets.
Blue wine stains penetrated my sleep.
The sea, infused with stars.
Slow rhythms predominated
The glare of the day persisted into night
The femininity of love was universally acknowledged.
Skies were bursting with surprise
Lightning, and the wind conspired for hours.
Beneath the waves, the exalted dawn was deja vu.
Sometimes she saw the same woman he saw.
The low sun was strained with all that gothik horror lacked,
Fact. The waves rolled off his shivering dream,
We rise to the eyes of the seas slowly.
John Marks
Mon 12th Aug 2019 20:48
Thank you Fred. Many and sincere blessings to you, too, dear Sir.
God! ... Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses
PS...."Epi oinopa ponton," a phrase used often in Homer's Odyssey, means “upon the wine-coloured sea,” which the poem's English-language translators have often rendered as "wine-dark." Mulligan’s attribution in Telemachus, “snotgreen,” casts a sarcastic light on this venerated epic colouring of the ocean. But Stephen recalls the phrase in Proteus and restores its Homeric tinge: "oinopa ponton, a winedark sea."