At Anchor: The Real Situation by Kwame Dawes

At Anchor: The Real Situation

                for Bob Marley, Bavaria, November 1980

 

Here is the brilliant morning on a fishing boat,

this is the dream a dying man has in midwinter,

the world covered in light and shadow—he dreams

of St. Ann’s Bay, of the murmur of soft waves.

 

The sea is familiar as all dawns are familiar.

We walk into them knowing it is our sack

of troubles that we spill open to color

the sky. But here on the boat, at anchor,

apart from the ordinary lull of the easy

tide, there is a certain peace.

 

He cannot know that in six months

the weight of locked wool on his shoulders

will be lifted, that in the soft gloom of a German

chalet in deep January he will anticipate with terror

his death, rewriting his theology of eternity, shadowed

by the swirling clouds, the bickering sycophants,

the friends who will not stop to pray, frightened

as they are by the end of the crusade, the last

triumphant march through the world’s plaza where

the faithful Milanese, one hundred thousand strong,

stand beatific under the benediction of brutalizing music.

 

And here he already knows that his last songs

convey the weight of a man sitting on the sea,

staring out into the slithering metallic green

and imagining his words as prayers.

 

This is the burden a poet must carry with him

to the sea, the burden for a truth unfettered

by the promise of another morning. The sea

is a continuous tomorrow, so unremarkable

that it becomes an exquisite now:

what a lofty standard of truth it is for a poem.