Steady  Voice

Don Hynes

The winds are up from the south

pushing white caps over grey water,

the Pacific storm reaching over the Olympics,

Vancouver Island, to the inland sea.

Most of the shorebirds are hunkered down,

Canada geese tucked into their lee cover,

even the otter seem to be laying low.

There’s a beautiful excitement on the wind,

as if the vast ocean were breathing upon us,

carrying messages from the far east

of change and new life.

Gulls flare up into the gusts —

storms won’t put them off,

but there are no sails within sight

and we too take shelter.

The sea has begun to roll,

the long fetch of southerly wind

bringing the broad channel awake,

yet hundreds of feet below in a stone-lined canyon

the dark is unperturbed, the water still.

The depth will not roil as the surface churns

the deeper voice steady in the sweeping wind.

I want to arc like the gull, dive like a whale

into the vast darkness, but I keep my post,

calm in the great change upon us,

finding myself in the wind, the wave

and the deep grey sea, vast and unmoved.

© donhynes.com