What must I think,
When I gaze upon the sea?
What must I see,
When standing before it?
First, I see its extension.
Its blue mantle stretches
Miles and miles, never reached
By the greatest of sketches.
But what are limits
In God's creation?
Are they in the law of the heart?
Or in the law of the mind?
To think of extent
Is to project myself;
To place what is man-made,
Upon God's demesne.
I turn then, my mind's eyes,
To the age of the sea,
Before I was, it was.
After I die, it shall live on.
The sea is never the same.
If you look away, and then back,
The water you called sea
Are now lost.
It has seen many things.
Mighty empires, rise and fall.
Vibrant cities, rich and poor.
But all, all is the same to him.
All comes from the water,
All will return to the water.
Water wears rock into dust,
and from dust we all come.
Before the sea, then,
I am small.
Before him, then,
I am young.
But here we are, riding its waves,
going places in machines,
that carry, in their insides,
the winds of the world.
We might be tempted,
To call ourselves grand.
Singing songs of victory.
Proud of great conquest.
But the wise know it is not true.
They know we are small.
But how small, I ask,
Atop the decks of a ship of glass.
We've reduced size to limits,
Power to dominion,
Ownership to possession,
And Being to charade.
We are small, but the Earth
Is, by divine right, ours.
To have and to hold,
From beginning to end.
We have come to know the sea,
At least what he allows to be seen.
But to be masters?
Not even of ourselves.
What must I think,
When I gaze upon the sea?
What must I see,
When standing before him?
Ever-changing marble.
Sweet, calm, peaceful.
Endless deep-blue mantle.
Violent, roaring, rageful.
We are small,
But, of all things,
Only we know,
That we are.