The sea lay beneath us like leather,
the tanned and crennellated hide
of some dead thing.
The carcass was long gone --
think how impressive
that corpus must have been!
All that was left to see was skin,
thrown down upon the floor,
saltwater surface shining in the sun.
Yes, and there it lay
the day we sacrificed our skins
to save our children, who were small enough.
I remember you wept for the ocean,
in turns glad,
then sad that we turned out
so deeply empathetic.
Everything wanting,
nothing wasting --
no one can live that way for long.
So we left our cave
for better lands
where all was dreaming and clouds
above a leather floor.
Before, we had only darkness,
pain was our rock,
limestone definitions for our world.
Hardness and a little water
left no room for dreams,
for children, nor for clouds.
In the beginning was not-knowing, grasping.
Then grasping and blindness turned
to turning itself.
Within the turning, germination:
seed from some sunlit height falling
deep to deeper, deepest.
And still turning, suddenly,
we held our seedling proof
of passage to greener heights.
So trusting, we began to climb
and turning turned to squeezing.
Remember the sanding of our skin,
then shaving, grating, peeling?
We were too large to follow,
in reverse,
the seed's bright path and keep our skin.
So we emerged and stood blinking in the sun
sans cuticles, earlobes,
soles of foot or lids of eye.
Then came the day we taught
ourselves to fly,
and crossed the sea,
and then you cried.