Nicolas Greenwood

Dear Pacific,

You covered my face with freshness
‘Twas inside the roar I felt your balm
Of foaming brine washed ashore
With celestial reflection from the sky
Dancing below me in silvery grey.

I watched your waves leap at the clouds
Beneath the surface a depth untold
You hid with an ominous mantle
Of shimmer bright and waves hypnotic
A forgotten tale below the light of day.

Beneath your ripples of molten lead
I glimpsed a world of iridescent blue
A place where tears are never shed
That fades into darkness’s oblivion
Like the sky’s night that fades away.

I saw palm trees bent in the wind
A wind that made the grains of sand dance
Lo, the sky wept; I saw her tears fall
The rain lent tears to my windswept cheeks
Your angry waves swirled into the bay.

Then, like a dream, it was all gone
The moonlight reflected off your ripples
You whispered something I couldn’t understand
Something about love, something about hate
Something about a face that slipped away.

Ah, tell me, mysterious waves
The secrets you hold beneath your foam
The sights you saw, the ages that passed you
Tell me a story of your origins
Of the times before night and day.

Did you freeze into an icy stone
When you traversed the cosmic hall
Glittering with the light of stars
All to one day wash these humble shores
And splash these cliffs with glorious spray?

And what of tomorrow, dear ocean
Whither lies your next destination?
What alien sky will you reflect?
What foreign shores will you carve and sculpt
Oh beautiful ocean, so blue, so grey?

I understand it now; I hear your voice;
The answer lies in that strange place
Where the stars and your surface meet
Called the horizon by a few of us
Where begins and ends night and day.

Dear Pacific,

About This Poem

Massive bodies of water, and especially oceans, fascinate me. I’ve been fortunate enough to stand on the shore of the Pacific on the American western coast multiple times in my life, and every time it has never failed to convince me that the human mind cannot and 86 will never be able to fully comprehend the vastness of our oceans. We stand there, on the shore, watching the horizon, and all we can see of this incomprehensibly gigantic body of water is a meagre 5 kilometers out, at most—not even the tiniest, visible distance when we look at a map of the world or a globe. And all we see is the surface. Below is yet another world, with its own mountains and valleys, stories and civilizations. With its own view of the sun, moon and stars. And with its own depths the size of continents that rays of sunlight have never touched.

There is also something inexplicably special and awe-inspiring about experiencing a storm on a beach. With all that open space in front of you, the wind is incredibly powerful and that combined with the roaring of the surf creates an absolutely overpowering sensory experience.

Dear Pacific is an exploration of these images and emotions.

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