I stand before the sea <br />and it rolls and rolls in its green blood <br />saying, 'Do not give up one god <br />for I have a handful.' <br />The trade winds blew <br />in their twelve-fingered reversal <br />and I simply stood on the beach <br />while the ocean made a cross of salt <br />and hung up its drowned <br />and they cried Deo Deo. <br />The ocean offered them up in the vein of its might. <br />I wanted to share this <br />but I stood alone like a pink scarecrow. <br /> <br />The ocean steamed in and out, <br />the ocean gasped upon the shore <br />but I could not define her, <br />I could not name her mood, her locked-up faces. <br />Far off she rolled and rolled <br />like a woman in labor <br />and I thought of those who had crossed her, <br />in antiquity, in nautical trade, in slavery, in war. <br />I wondered how she had borne those bulwarks. <br />She should be entered skin to skin, <br />and put on like one's first or last cloth, <br />envered like kneeling your way into church, <br />descending into that ascension, <br />though she be slick as olive oil, <br />as she climbs each wave like an embezzler of white. <br />The big deep knows the law as it wears its gray hat, <br />though the ocean comes in its destiny, <br />with its one hundred lips, <br />and in moonlight she comes in her nudity, <br />flashing breasts made of milk-water, <br />flashing buttocks made of unkillable lust, <br />and at night when you enter her <br />you shine like a neon soprano. <br /> <br />I am that clumsy human <br />on the shore <br />loving you, coming, coming, <br />going, <br />and wish to put my thumb on you <br />like The Song of Solomon.<br /><br />Anne Sexton<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-consecrating-mother/
