BLUE
The Mediterranean remains blue across centuries of swallowing.
Because it is not a cemetery, it does not date its memories.
On the sky is a diary that catalogued the bodies lost to the sea.
In the language of a gong, water clashed against the rocks,
an elegy to the fish that embalmed our dead inside their cold bodies.
After the new millennium, I learned to forget what I cannot save.
A seed vault was built outside a deserted city—obscured with grief,
I searched for familiar faces from the shadows on the walls.
Now, every song in a foreign tongue sounds like a prayer.
"Blue" originally appeared in The Kenyon Review.
