Water Poems

Water Related Poetry

On the breakwater in the summer dark, a man and a girl are sitting,
She across his knee and they are looking face into face.
Talking to each other without words, singing rythms in silence to each other.

A funnel of white ranges the blue dusk from an out- going boat,
Playing its searchlight, puzzled, abrupt, over a streak of green,
And two on the breakwater keep their silence, she on his knee.

---- On The Breakwater
      by Carl Sandburg

SEA TURTLES by DIOR
Swimming in the deep
This incredible species
Looks like bony shells.

I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees

By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'

---- The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water
      by W.B. Yeats

TURTLE by VERONICA

Swimming by the shore
Far and wide in search of food
She finds shrimp and clams.

It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.

---- Water
      by Robert Lowell

SEAWEED by SHELBY
Swaying down below
Seahorses hide within it
Waving gracefully.

I think that the Root of the Wind is Water --
It would not sound so deep
Were it a Firmamental Product --
Airs no Oceans keep --
Mediterranean intonations --
To a Current's Ear --
There is a maritime conviction
In the Atmosphere–

---- I think that the Root of the Wind is Water
      by Emily Dickinson

More Water Poems Here