1. Leviathan by W.S. Merwin

2. Leviathan by W.S. Merwin

This is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack,

Ancient as ocean’s shifting hills, who in sea-toils

Travelling, who furrowing the salt acres

Heavily, his wake hoary behind him,

Shoulders spouting, the fist of his forehead

Over wastes gray-green crashing, among horses unbroken

From bellowing fields, past bone-wreck of vessels,

Tide-ruin, wash of lost bodies bobbing

No longer sought for, and islands of ice gleaming

Who ravening the rank flood, wave-marshalling,

Overmastering the dark sea-marches, finds home

And harvest. Frightening to foolhardiest

Mariners, his size were difficult to describe:

The hulk of him is like hills heaving,

Dark, yet as crags of drift-ice, crowns cracking in thunder,

Like land’s self by night black-looming, surf churning and trailing

Along his shores’ rushing, shoal-water boding

About the dark of his jaws; and who should moor at his edge

And far on afoot would find gates of no gardens,

But the hill of dark underfoot diving,

Closing overhead, the cold deep, and drowning.

He is called Leviathan, and named for rolling,

First created he was of all creatures,

He has held Jonah three days and nights,

He is that curling serpent that in ocean is,

Sea-fright he is, and the shadow under the earth.

Days there are, nonetheless, when he lies

Like an angel, although a lost angel

On the waste’s unease, no eye of man moving

Bird hovering, fish flashing, creature whatever

Who after him came to herit earth’s emptiness

Froth at flanks seething soothes to stillness,

Waits; with one eye he watches

Dark of night sinking last, with one eye dayrise

As at first over foaming pastures. He makes no cry

Though that light is a breath. The sea curling,

Star-climbed, wind-combed, cumbered with itself still

As at first it was, is the hand not yet contented

Of the Creator. And he waits for the world to begin.