To Touch Boat

Sailing is a way of life
Elemental, arduous, changeable and constant
Wonderfilled reality's exhilarating spills.

Sailing is a way of life:
Think it through before you do
Anything - it matters.
Go through the safety checklist
Before you leave the slip - and
Set your docking lines.
Plot a course and watch the wind
And read the charts and pay attention.
Read the cat's-paws on the water
That bespeak a shifting breeze
And the gull that shares his blue Bay sky
With your sails.

Know where you are
So you can get to where you are going.
Work with the wind and respect the tide;
You can't hurry
In a sailboat, but seven knots
Sounds like sixty at a thirty-degree heel
With a squall blowing in.
Head for a hurricane hole, a safe harbor;
And when you know - and you must know - you've reached your limit
And the limit of your boat,
Know also that the Coast Guard is there
And will help
And won't yell at you for calling.

Sailing, captain and crew and boat
And wind and water meld
Into one whole which transcends,
Which unifies and so becomes far greater than
The mere sum of its parts;
And that is good, and love,
And that sailing is a way of life
In the hurricane hole in the upper Chesapeake Bay,
Which has its share of shallows and shoals
And soaring sunrises and seagulls.

I must go to the River
And touch boat.

©Elizabeth Dunbar 1984