Telemachus, son of the silent waters

My mother is the ocean;
Tranquil and with silver scaled skin.
Her silent throat engulfed
Every stone my clumsy fingers flung
To wake her waves -
She never answered.

The heaviest stone of all -
The most soul-tugging question
She would reject time and again:
Place it back ashore
And tactfully and wordlessly retreat
For twenty years.

I’d hear my steps echo in the
Canyon of Ithaca’s great palace,
The labyrinth of her knot-tying mind.
I’d watch myself dive head-first
Into her waters.
She never held me.

She’d slide away
Like ocean-tide recedes at dawn;
The pieces of her words she’d drop -
Polished white seashell shards -
Were treasures picked by other hands,
Not mine, not even once.

Who’s worth she placed above
Her half-transparent son?
The worth of dirty hands -
Washing clothes upon her shore at dusk,
The worth of dirty mouths -
Twelve gaping, gossiping fish.

Twelve daughters which
She never birthed herself;
To them she’d wash back up
All gold which had retired centuries ago
To her black ocean floor.

She’d scan me feet to face
And see no water ripple from that gaze
In swelling circles -
I have no ocean in my blood,
She knew I’d grow to float on it,
Not be it.

Him.
Of him reminded I too much:
His stance, his stubbornness,
His eyes he’d set on land
Even at deepest sea -
I grew to be no water nymph,
My mother, woe to me, she knew it well.

Aghast to see her husband’s face
When, kneeling down,
I’d stare into her salty abyss,
My mother had eroded down to sand
What little I had of his presence.

For man dare not tame water.
Son, husband, brother, king -
No hand dare block flow of the current.
I dared not, too, until I heard
My father’s voice: calling for me
Across the breathless sea.