Looking for a reading for a scattering of ashes at sea
October 14, 2017 9:33 PM   Subscribe

I'm looking for a short essay or non-rhymey poem that talks about loss and renewal for an ash scattering in the ocean.

We won't be far off from shore but the ocean was a special place for the deceased and I'd like a short reading or poem that touches on the themes of the natural world, a return to the ocean as giver of life, and/or the cycle of renewal.

I'm already thinking about The Peace of Wild Things but am looking for something else that's a little more essay-ish.
posted by otherwordlyglow to Writing & Language (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: How about "In Blackwater Woods," by Mary Oliver?

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
posted by stillmoving at 11:03 PM on October 14, 2017 [7 favorites]


Best answer: Two bits of Eliot's Four Quartets seem apt to me, considering your criteria of The Sea and more "essay like"
   The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite,
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
                                                  The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
                                                  The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning form the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
or
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

posted by Rumple at 11:30 PM on October 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Swinburne's "The garden of Proserpine", the part below mentions the sea.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45288/the-garden-of-proserpine



From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
posted by 445supermag at 7:47 AM on October 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


Best answer: You might be able to adapt a bit from Thich Naht Hahn's, "Waves are Water":

In the beginning we think that we have a beginning and an end, a birth and a death, and we might think that before our birth we were not there and after our death we will not be there, and we get caught up in the concept of being and nonbeing.

Let us look deeply at a wave in the ocean. It lives its life of a wave, but it lives the life of water at the same time. If the wave were able to turn toward itself and touch its substance, which is water, then it would be able to attain nonfear.

The wave does not have to search for water, because water is the very substance of the wave.
posted by gudrun at 8:00 AM on October 15, 2017


Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions. I printed out a few of these and more and read the Mary Oliver one, which was well received.
posted by otherwordlyglow at 7:51 PM on October 15, 2017


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