Between Two Seas

[The following poem is based on a story I came across many moons ago in a newspaper article from July of 1962: an open water swimmer twenty-four-year-old Mary Margaret Newell from Detroit became the first woman to successfully swim the length of the Bosphorus Strait, completing the 19 miles in 4 hours, 53 minutes and 11 seconds.]

Her parents called her our little fish,
but she knew, seasick and thrashed,
she was human, swimming out there
in the exacting open waters,
in the congested wake of cargo ships and tankers,
of small wooden crafts with their outboards sputtering
back to the docks of Istanbul,

out there
where the Black Sea had been left behind and
the Sea of Marmara still only a possibility,
where she cut through oil skims
and surface dregs with its taste of pollutants,
where the strident crosscurrents
punished her, her muscles like hot metal
being hammered, her body like pebbles in salt water
that seemingly sought to dissolve
the glue that held them together,

out there
becoming
in the hand over hand,
in the kick,
in the breath,
the persistent refusal.