Shattered by your call,

I come to this shore

not to seek its beauty but its pain.

That of the emptiness that we are claiming,

that of the death that we simply must have

in our poetry

in our souls

so that we can immortalize our muse

that is killing us

yet making us live at the same time.

I come to your shore ravaged

wanting to rediscover the weight

of your water upon my aching breast.

And your brine melts my present

into a past too unbearable for this seeking.

I taste sands in my eyes

as my wounded knees fall

in anguished consecration.

For to us:

Brokenness has a sublimity

far more splendid than being whole.

The sea will claim our wounds

mixture of salt and blood

whose salinity can numb and heal

all our compunctions and multiplicity.

There is no such high

as the levity of my body

against your cradling womb

of crashing waves:

a plethora of overlapping savageness,

madness and pleasure.

The beauty of every crest and trough

stitching my skin

one with each strand

of your now endurable silence

the abstraction of

all things painful

all things blissful.

From afar,

the sun can only bear witness

and weep for my restless spirit

navigating only within the bounds

of your contiguous plane.

This is my greatest atonement:

To encumber my nakedness

to your sea

of absences

To bequeath my soul

to my unforgiving muse.

To you whom my life ceases and my death begins.

My sea,

I shall hold you

crimson against the sky of my blood

my body and my words casting shadows

falling upon you

with unbroken beauty

an undying piety

a guiltless testimony,

a quiet deliverance of

a perishing wing, a pristine soul.

-Pambie Herrera

December, 2004