Grasping blindly through the barnacled slab
he hunts eyeless for his armored prey.
He cracks the clam and ignores the infant crab
who traipses by but is no threat today.
Perhaps he will hide in the deep again
before the great ‘Out There’ supplies fresh store
of food and horrors to his briny den.
Of course, his pool is but one upon a shore,
yet he’s not climbed an inch outside.
The beach could harbor hundreds like his own
but his half-brain cannot perceive the tide—
that each day invades his world of sand and stone—
as anything but rain, perhaps a flood.
Severed from the sea, all he knows is mud.
* This poem was also inspired by the following quotes from C.S. Lewis,
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”“Let us suppose a mystical limpet, a sage among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. But then there comes erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet’s words is simply and solely the negatives. From these, uncorrected by any positive insight, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape, a structure, and organs.” Miracles, pg. 142