The grovelling world has made a virtue out of fear,
but, my dearest friend, you felt life rising-

life swept through you like a terrible tide,
and you did not cower the way many would have done,
you let life sweep through, violent, icy, atlantic,
gouging your shuddering walls, sculpting the shadowed cavern
where the green, the tourmaline, of your soul resides and thrives,
in that crazed, that tessellated lightning-struck grotto
below the level of the waves.
Life washed through, draped in a kelp forest of love,
but, really, life! life! beating an undersea path,
shaping walls of dark basalt, making cathedrals
from mumbling slabs of stone.

Brave friend, you let life barge through you, and recede,
you let life usher in its crashing of glass, its smashing of foam,
and let it escape,
taking away yesterday's gravel, wrack and weed,
scouring and stealing away.
Nothing is more courageous than that, dearest sub-mariner.
Those terrible, thrashing, persistent waves are all.