Member Poem

The ocean does not forget.
It hoards the hush of screams unmet,
its blue mouth stitched with secrets kept.
A choir of ghosts who never slept.
Even now, it exhales telegram wires,
teacups with trembling porcelain fires,
hair combs tangled with ghostlight curls,
wedding bands sealed in salt and pearls.
Grief dressed in barnacles and brine,
etched in rust like a sacred sign.

I read the headline yesterday:
A final mission underway.
To fetch what time has tried to steal,
what salt corrodes but won’t conceal.
Relics slipping toward disintegration,
adrift like prayers without salvation.
A scavenger’s psalm, a futile climb,
a race against the hands of time.
As if the sea were a vault we’d find,
with a door that opens to the kind.
As if water could be reasoned with,
as if rusted faith still held a myth.

I pressed play again.
1997 flicker,
nostalgia’s frost grows ever thicker.
The blue tint of doomed devotion,
love drowned in cinematic motion.
Jack’s fingers pale with rigor’s kiss
while Rose exhales frost into a brass abyss.
A requiem in D minor played,
looped for memory, soft and frayed.

We know the ending.
We always did.
Yet we return, as children hid
beneath the quilt of what we crave,
a ship, a name, an unseen grave.
We watch as sorrow loops, rehearsed,
as if grief once sipped would quench the thirst.
We drink the myth in gulps, not sips,
from memory’s glass with trembling lips.

I was ten the first I knew,
wide-eyed, my wonder breaking through.
I clutched belief like a life vest tight,
thought love could sail through iceberg night.
That a locket tucked in velvet blue
could trap a soul, and make it true.
Not made of gold, but something higher
a whispered name, a breath, a fire.

But it was never just pretend.
Two thousand lives met water’s end.
Vanished beneath the Atlantic’s page,
a mass obituary, no age.
Their stories folded, cold and curled,
a lullaby beneath the world.
The violin played till the hull gave in,
its final note a requiem sin.
The operator keyed his plea,
hope in dots, dashed into sea,
until the silence took him whole,
and water swallowed every role.

And now they dive
not for the bones,
but for memory’s dial tones.
A Marconi key still humming clear,
a rusted voice recorder near,
timepieces that forgot to cease,
ticking through the depths for peace.
Echoes from a world gone still,
unmade by water, shaped by will.

I wonder what those voices sought.
Who heard them then, who gave them thought?
And who still listens, ear to air,
to frequencies no longer there?
I think of my own voice, low,
in credit’s hush, where echoes go
calling names I barely own,
answered only when alone.
A séance held in the glow of screen,
where memory flickers in between.

In the film, Rose lets him go.
But someone always dives below.
Back for the locket, back for the ring,
back for whatever the wreck might bring.
Back for the part that stayed behind,
sinking where the music twined.

This is what we do, we grieve
in scattered ways, in webs we weave.
We mourn in shards and sunken tiles,
in relics touched by passing miles.
We press our palms to history’s crust,
and hold our breath beside the rust.
We ask the waves, What did they dream
those who vanished in the scream?

We call it history.
But it's more,
a love swept up in sonar lore.
A guilt that echoes through the scans,
a riptide grasp with unseen hands.
Something unnamed pulls us again,
to trembling cups and gleaming bands,
constellations drowned in day,
stars we never meant to say.

The ocean does not forget.
Its memory stands, a minaret.
And neither do we.
We press play.
We ache.
We enter the altar of water’s glow,
kneel where only the lost ones know.
Light candles made of celluloid,
mourning what we can't avoid.

And we watch it sink again.