Coffee and Irony

(sea by Shana)

We’re drunk by now
and even then you’re inside your own
head, floating, deciding what to surrender
to and what to leave submerged.
Once, on the island that made
me, the ocean was a ritual
too. I climbed mountains
in an old car in the middle of the night to make
love at its shores, to remember where I had
come from so that it might stay
with me where I was going. That night
the water came up; lapped at our bodies, furious
in the sand. We wept.
We filled
each other’s cups. We put the ocean
to our mouths. We drank.

from “Claim – For the Ocean” by Roger Bonair-Agard, Drunken Boat