“The Sailboat”
The weather is calm, there is not a ripple on the sea,
Yet there is a storm that rages in me
There is no wind, our sail is flat,
We haven’t moved barely at all,
Yet the storm in me is worse this fall,
We turn on the motor to cross the sea,
I’ve never seen it so quiet and still
The sun bounces off the water and blinds us,
Blinds us for lies beneath the surface
For the reflection that bounces off the glossy perfect surface disguises what is underneath,
But when one looks through the top layer of the sea,
They may just discover the storm that rages in me,
We drop anchor, swim to shore, grab a beer and then some more,
Back to the boat, under the stars, we sleep on our blankets on the floor
The sun wakes us up at dawn and during the night, the wind had come on
We put up our sails and spend the day racing over the sparkly sea
During this time of excitement and thrills,
My thoughts are happy and my worries are nill
The day was fun and seemed never ending, it seemed to last 10,000 days
But the whole time that we cruised over the ocean,
The storm in me simmered on low, at times almost extinguished, only occasionally to be kept alive by a rough brush of air
But as this day eventually ended, and the sea once again became calm,
I again went to shore looking for what I had left behind, now many many years before
I looked and I looked, but I could not find it,
My treasure had been taken from me
Time had washed my treasure from me,
And that is why the storm rages in me
I wrote the poem “The Sailboat,” as a poetic reflection of the fact that we all must continue to sail through life with purpose, sometimes with help and sometimes without, all the while dealing with some level of grief, loss, heartache, challenge, disappointment or cognitive dissonance.
After I wrote the poem "The Sailboat," I wondered why the emotion "anger" was the primary emotion. After studying the Enneagram (topic of two previous articles I wrote), it made sense to me. The Enneagram is a 3 x 3 arrangement of nine personality types in three Centers. The Centers are: the Instinctive Center, the Feeling Center, and the Thinking Center. There are 3 types in each center. And in each Center is a dominant emotion. In the Instinctive Center, the dominant emotion is anger or rage, in the Feeling Center, the dominant emotion is Shame, and in the Thinking Center, the dominant emotion is Fear. Since I believe that I am type 9, I fall in the Instinctive Center with my dominant emotion of anger or rage. Thus, I feel that when I face emotional conflict, anger is the emotion that gets expressed.
As with any poetry, the poem is up for interpretation by the reader. But for me, this poem reflects the anger of the loss of oneself or a loved one, as well as perhaps dealing with the reality of midlife. I'm hoping that something in my poem the Sailboat, resonates with you.
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