Once upon a time there was a sea, a sea that swallowed sailors, and their cries echoed between the waves and the sun like all the forlorn cries of gulls fighting for a bit of dead fish. Between its waves, waves towering like the gaping maw of cliff sides, the sailors cried their pitiful cries and disappeared, sunk to the bottom like so many rocks, with no more in their eyes than rocks, until they touched the sandy bottom and became the roots of kelp. Sailors love the sea and seas love to swallow sailors.
Isabella sees them all. She watches them from her undersea garden. They find more waves, and more rocks, and more kelp to sleep in. They find more to name and more to net and they never cease. They are a hoard.
The gulls who swim in the sky urge us into the waves. They chide us to charge on, swim on. They are the jokesters laughing at us. And we fly wild into the sea no longer made of water, into the waves that tear us apart into strips of wind, into the rocks bare and parched in this new sun’s heat. Along the dark horizon, where the ships sit like tiny toys on the dry seabed and the great nets unravel, the bodies of all the sailors will be revealed and their water soaked souls will sing. These laments are the songs of love and loss on the Salish Sea.
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