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The Weeping Sea Beast

Naomi Replansky

1918 –

2023

Tentacled for food,

You range your underwater neighborhood.

To look, to like, to eat, to break your fast!

Before you move an inch an hour is past,

Your prey is past, a swarm of scales, an eye,

A round fish eye, a rude unblinking eye.

You close on nothing; slowly you untwine

Your many arms and trail them through the brine.

Now sailors at the surface hear you cry,

And from those heights they cannot fathom why.

For there are agile creatures all around

Who dart like flames through this rich hunting ground

And others who lie still and gaping wide

And make no move; but armies come inside.

Copyright © 1994 by Naomi Replansky. "The Weeping Sea Beast" originally appeared in The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (Another Chicago Press, 1994). Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Naomi Replansky was born in the Bronx on May 23, 1918. The daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, she began writing poems at a young age. By her mid-teens, she was publishing poems in literary journals and anthologies. Replansky studied history at Hunter College but did not finish her degree, opting instead to go to work. During the 1940s and 1950s, she worked in a factory in New York City and as a translator in Los Angeles. In the latter decade, she earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles.

About Naomi Replansky

Themes

Animals

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About Not Writing

Tongue-tied, I stand before

Myself as inquisitor.

I loved to mark time

With a beat, with rhyme.

Time marked me with its thumb,

Slowed down the pendulum.

Slowed it down, or stopped:

Words were lopped, words dropped—

No use to devise

Reasons or alibis.

Now, strangely, I draw breath

Well past my ninetieth.

What’s begun is almost done,

Still I must brood upon

The much tha

Naomi Replansky

2018

Catalogue

My blurring eyes, my deafened ears—

O careless sadism of the years!

Sun-loving and sun-ravaged skin—

One-sided love has done you in.

My teeth—less said, less missed!—my heart—

My runaway, my telltale heart—

Heart whose misfirings can defeat

The pulse of this iambic beat!

(While hypochondria detects

Whatever ill it hears of next.)

In couplets that are not heroic

I try to say, in accents stoic:

Naomi Replansky

2018

The Contrary Muse

Poet (kneels stiffly):

I beg you, Muse, come down, come down and redeem me!

You used to arrive any time, you would come for no reason.

Now, though the sweat of death stood on my forehead,

No song would be shaken.

Muse:

I pay no heed to prayers or to reproaches.

I bless those who burn, but they must not burn only for me.

Turn your passion elsewhere. Then, when least you remember

My touch, I may touch you.

Naomi Replansky

2018

Poems

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The Weeping Sea Beast

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