Blue Waves

Marvin K. White

We have survived waves before:
floods, hurricanes, typhoons.
We have cried for sea change before,
for a post-diluvian world
where we are not washed away,
but live on fertile ground.
We have prayed for wetlands, a permaculture.
The floodplain, a place of beginning again.
They call this phenomenon a blue wave.

The ocean absorbs the red
from the spectrum of light.
Blue is what remains visible.
But do not confuse
what the water shows you
with everything the water has swallowed.
There are whole histories
beneath this color.
People who never made it ashore.
Prayers that never made it above water.
Names the ocean has been keeping
longer than this country
has been counting votes.
And now the water is moving.
Because a wave is what happens
when something that would not move
finally has to.

A blue wave says,
“Dear God, we don’t want to learn
to breathe underwater.”
A blue wave says,
“Sometimes, we are forced
to learn to swim into activism.”
God, we cannot hear you
while we are drowning.
This wave is not another jumping ship.
Not another ark with room
for only two of a kind.
Not another salvation
that calls some people cargo
and leaves others overboard.
This wave says the gavel
cannot drown out the people,
that the undertow of power
can no longer hold our heads
beneath the law.
This wave says nobody has to prove
they deserve to come ashore.

A blue wave washing the sidewalks
of the Tenderloin, not washing away
the people, but the lie
that some lives are disposable.
A blue wave making room for gladness
without requiring grief to evacuate the body.
A blue wave until the line for a meal
is no longer the longest line
in somebody’s day.
A blue wave until “welcome home”
comes with a key.
A blue wave until a body is not a bill
somebody cannot pay.
A blue wave until God comes out
of every closet we built in God’s name.
A blue wave of possibility
that says surviving is no longer
the highest thing we dare to imagine.

But a blue wave
is not an ocean of freedom.
A ballot is not a breakwater.
A seat is not a lifeboat.
A victory speech cannot hold back
the next storm.
Politics is still the master’s yacht.
So, a blue wave still means
renew and renovate and rebuild.
A blue wave still means
the movement of one body
can become the movement of many.
A blue wave still means
the shore is not the end of the ocean,
and what has been pushed to the margins
can return with the force of the tide.
A blue wave still means
we refuse to leave the children
nothing but a history of drowning.

And tonight, O God,
help us receive the waterlogged,
the shipwrecked,
the ones thrown overboard.
Let us not mistake the wreckage
for the people.
Let us hear their names above the weather.
Tonight, Beloved, all water is free.
Until somebody dams it.
Diverts it.
Bottles it.
Sells it back to the thirsty.
And tells the ocean
it has exceeded its boundaries.
But a wave does not ask permission
to remember it belongs to the sea.

God, if you are still speaking
through the storm, turn up your voice.
Not to command the sea into silence,
but to teach us how to hear
one another calling through it.
Remind us that we were made of water
before we were made into property.
Help us ride this wave, O God.
Not to escape the world,
but to arrive in it together.
In this moment.
Beloved, all water is free.
The question is whether
we will let each other be.

Amen.