Darius Degher’s poems have appeared in various American and European literary magazines, including Measure, Think, Agenda, The Red Wheelbarrow, Equinox, Poetry Salzburg Review, and others. His collection To See the Sound was published in 2014, and a new one is underway. Born and raised in Southern California, he lived in Sweden and taught at Malmö University for many years. Darius has degrees from UCLA (BA in English) and Lancaster University, England (MA in creative writing). He currently runs the Ocean of Poetry reading series for the city of Encinitas, California. He’s also a singer-songwriter.

And So I Break

I gather in the reaches of the south,
somewhere down under or Tahiti way.
A tempest of sustained and blasting winds
has pushed the ocean waters deep and wide,
so deep they drag across the ocean floor.
A ground swell scraping seabed sand, I come.

With surface seas of some odd forty feet
I travel far, unstoppable, you see,
lifting freighters and aircraft carriers
then easing them back downward into troughs.
The forerunners, my progeny, are off
to batter coasts and islands on the way.
I hear the blue whales call from miles apart,
through me, to echolocate family.

The water that composes me, the drops
and droplets, separate but also one,
are held together by the hydrogen-
to-oxygen electrostatic glue
that’s swirling in this surface-tension mass
and moving me along as something new.

I’m just one of countless ocean swells
that came before and will forever come,
that make the waves and run with tides in seas
that link to all the waters of the earth
in clouds and rain and snowfall feeding flows
of glaciers, icecaps, rivers, lakes and streams.

But anyway, as I approach the continent
I mount the waiting shelf, now finally free.
I’m powerful and fragile as I rage,
as reef and beach become a welcome mat
reminding me that as I live I die,
both states existing all at once the same.

I rise up with a rearing godhead face
of green and blue, my now immaculate
design too perfect for the fittest to survive.
And so . . . I break.