The Oarsman's Beads

Though damned, he’d not deride her, the sea, his lone provider,

but there’s none who could survive her when she’s a raging mad.

And he, in fear assuming that death was surely looming;

comes the ocean’s wrath consuming whatever hopes he had.

Low the clouds, none darker e’er, his whole world in grim despair;

far and wide and everywhere in the caustic spumes of brine.

Fought hard through the depressions though ripped of his possessions;

bore angers and aggressions of a merciless design.

Rowed on with aspiration, somehow to find salvation,

midst the terror and frustration faced the fury of the seas.

When smashed the boat’s devotion, so fierce the maddened ocean,

he lost in the commotion where the tempest earns her fees.

With faith, he would survive her, pray God, come civilize her;

even He could not baptise her, this omnipresent force

For she, of fierce a temper, not given to surrender

and all who come to face her she would smite without remorse.

Let not how he surrendered be that how he remembered,

his reasonings dismembered in the bedlam of the storm.

Grasping at illusions, at the helm of his confusions,

to steer his own intrusions through the furore of its scorn.

And she, his life, his maker and now his undertaker,

when broke the final breaker, breaking hopes into regrets.

In gale, hail and Glory Bes; yielding to her wrathful seas,

from bead to bead, his rosary beads, he prayed into the depths.