Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, IN THE GREAT FLUX, by CALE YOUNG RICE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

IN THE GREAT FLUX, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Two gulls, a gray and a brown, veterans both
Last Line: May fold them from all food and flight forever.
Subject(s): Birds; Death; Gulls; Life; Sea; Dead, The; Seagulls; Ocean


Two gulls, a gray and a brown, veterans both
At tide-fishing, dived to the sea for the same minnow
And struck fierce heads together in the high surf-foam.
The gray sheered away screaming; the brown beaked the prey
And fed one of the three hungers that trouble flesh.
The sea, that neither heeds nor knows such hungers,
Pushed in, purple-streaked and multitudinous,
On the red brawn of the granite. Its heaving undervoice
Huge and primevally hoarse, had no word to say
Of life and the mind-and-body-hungering breed of men,
Strangely emerged out of the marshy shore-slime,
But rather with sweeping cosmic sway disowned them.
For what has infinite surging to do with trivial selves
That gather together in brief brains and clamor "I!";
With little winged minds that dive desperately
For minnows of knowledge in star-deeps and clash together
And sheer off crying unsatedly because all knowledge
Begets but greater hunger? Thought, the measurer,
May chart seas, or starry abysses above them;
May even stride infinity and find it fused
Irrefutably with a Life and Being that alone
Can give worth to any width however vast.
But no foothold in the great flux is fixed thereby
For fearful men; the space-terror still will abide;
And still troubled they will continue to quest and cry
Like hungry gulls, -- knowing that death, the folder of wings,
May fold them from all food and flight forever.





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