Ocean Weed Rafts

How gentle the slow journey

Where tranquility awaits its passengers

How possessive

This sway and swirl of Nature

Providing haven

For scattered ash of all kinds

Nary fierce rock

Or tsunami roar

Disturbs its phantom-like stillness

Often…

Like the dreamt-of-journeys never taken while living,

Time seems patient with its scattered ash atop ocean cover

Knowing to rush is not Sargassum’s purpose.

To travel as a shadow,

Slipping over the depths of life’s genealogy,

Purchase may simply be by its own evaporative nature,

Finding its gas-filled berries providing safe harbor

Until exposure finally exhausts its flotational buoyancy.

It is the arid transformation

That gives flight to the ashes of Nature

In its search for a new

And different beginning.

Such is the belief of those

Thrusting the ashes of the dear departed

Into the winds,

Accepting consciousness is gone,

But confident atoms find continuance in many forms.

Melancholia invades consciousness,

As having just cast cremated ashes into the Mediterranean,

I take my rest atop some rocks above a Mykonos beach.

Continuing to stare at the space of normal olive tree shadow,

Accepting the shadowless tree must be with special peace at the moment,

Its atoms of survival at rest,

Like my own.