It is harvest time in the teeming sea
And the surges labor tirelessly
Like toil bent reapers with sickles of foam
They garner the harvest and carry it home,
Till the beaches throb to the rhythmic beat
As they strew it in windrows at our feet.

Slender strands like a whip lash, tear
At the cowering sands - ’tis the Dead-Man’s Hair
And the rockweed bulges with bulbous lumps
All yellow and brown, with the jagged stumps
Of kelp stalks wrenched by the undertow
From sunken glens where the sea things grow.

Eel grass rolled by the waves at play
In fresh cut swaths like the new mown hay;
Lettuce that glints with a fragile sheen:
And Irish moss with its mottled green
And cream and purple and pink and brown
From the matted gulfs where sailors drown!

Algae dyed like a fresh blown rose
Red is their telltale hue that glows
On the white sands edging the brooding sea.
A network of delicate imagery
Like the thin fine lines of an etching traced
That the blundering surges have not erased.

Harvest from tide tilled fields that bloom
Deep down where the sunlight fades in gloom.
Gardens of sinister mystery
Under the waves of the heaving sea.
Gardens the living may never know
Where dead men drift in the ebb and flow!

Jungles where fishes and creatures strange
Through the lush profusion may freely range.
Not for the living but for the dead
Are those fields submerged that we may not tread,
But their harvest is scattered within our reach
By the wild waves mourning along the beach.