Cold Riotous Sea
Jonah | Albert Pinkham Ryder | 1895 | Adapted | Public Domain | WikiArt
Though coldly bellied in the fish
as some would later swear, the seer
seems to himself to raise his hands
to holiness or hands he had
once thought to swear were good,
well fit to serve his yawing God,
to make petition for himself
while trundled in the fish’s gut
and far from temple or dry land.
Uncrushed as yet though jabbed by scraps
and fetid parts of sharks and squid.
A sorry dove with draggled wings
but gliding to the mountains’ roots.
The hurly-burly of this flight
below the breakers and the waves!
His curse-laid bones are coarsely propped
against the briny wall while strung
around his head are seaweed strands.
Clean addled by the depths about him,
the near gates of the netherworld,
it’s recent visions plague his mind.
His contrariness in boarding ship
despite instructions crisply laid,
direction west instead of east,
to Tarshish, mythic trading post
of beaten silver, tin and iron
along Hispania’s Sun Coast.
Or portside so he doubtless thought.
But then his rest below the deck
was splintered by the sailors’ fears,
fears for their lives and for the boat,
the single-masted crescent of a tub
of cedar bobbing like a cork.
The cedar boards became the fuel
for charry offerings to their gods
of agitated sheep and goats
whose blood soon slicked the battered deck.
Against the tug and whipping of the wind,
the lot of them stoked frantic fires.
But the nor’easter would not subside,
the monstrous waves were not subdued.
There’d be a mortifying end.
In haste, the panicked men cast lots
like Israelites to ascertain the cause
of the odd muteness of the gods.
Like who neglected what old rite?
Or which it was who ticked off whom?
Or was there just caprice in this?
The lot, the rough stone, fell to him
as he might have foretold it would.
No refutation of this sign.
The sailors hurled their spiteful words,
demand a reason for the storm
or else a course that alters fate.
He told them he had fled the Lord,
had picked the sore apostate’s path.
That’s why the autumn sea was roiled.
The men as good as drowned then grabbed
the option that they had on hand
to save their lives and circumvent
the wry, bum sacrifice that would,
he said, appease his brooding God.
They did their best to row to land,
but not in that tempestuous sea.
The waves rose up against their bid
and flung them backward at the ship.
Drained, they clambered to the deck
and cried out to the Lord for help
before they snatched him with rough hands
to chuck him from the queasy boat.
At once the sea ceased from her raging
for this, the needful sacrifice.
Accept, as he soon did, the fish
that loitered there to swallow him
as burlap does a tarnished cup.
So, here he is long fathoms deep,
his piecemeal joints and tendons sore,
stuck sinking in this thick, coarse skin.
Distraught, the rock dove starts to pray:
“It’s you who’ve hurled my battered frame
into these churlish depths! It’s hell!
Usurped by currents, tossed about,
then pinioned in this inky trap,
I’m all but partnered with the dead,
abandoned like the former ones,
those exiled from your hawkish sight.
The wrecks and weeds have hidden me.
Now as my rude life ebbs away,
may my petition rise to you,
drift to your holy temple.”
He squats, awaits the blank of fate,
the surfacing of messy hope
within the cold and riotous sea.
Greg Huteson is an administrator with an evangelical mission agency living in Taichung, Taiwan. He's the author of the chapbook, These Unblessed Days (Kelsay Books, 2022).
