Messenger from the Sea-God’s Palace
Dead on a California beach, an oarfish, mythical harbinger of doom. The third this year. If this is any kind of sign, the future is ugly. Rare envoy from the mesopelagic zone where light cannot touch, Doomsday Fish, Messenger from the Sea God’s Palace—twenty washed up in Japan just before the earthquake and tsunami. What have those cold eyes seen that made them give up on the ocean and what stunned that mouth to gape as if called to speak? Such a pale ribbon of a fish can’t buck the turbulence that hurled it up, the same swells that keep reaching for us and never flag. Friends, countrymen, lend me your oars. Let’s row together, as if our lives depend on it.
Susan Cohen is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Democracy of Fire (Broadstone Books, 2022). Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Southern Review, and has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and won the Terrain.org Poetry Prize, among other honors. She lives in California.
Read five poems by Susan Cohen, winner of the Terrain.org 11th Annual Contest in Poetry.
And read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header image by British naturalist, ichthyologist, and scientific illustrator Jonathan Couch, circa mid-1800s, courtesy Animalia.
