To Fight the Ocean.
By Camilia Darwish.
“your shores wash off / break off my / nameless desert
skin I inhale islands / gaping my undulating / ivory bones“
Ocean Chronicles IX by Newton Scheufler.
Father, I can’t fight the ocean
you laid me in
when life breathed life
into me against mama’s odds—
odds she played jumping off
the mountain
she piled on
the blackair burning
inside her chest
fearing, I hung on, her
womb unwanting
cliffs
you laid me
sealed between continents
to teach me to begin an end
drown downward
under grief-woven thick with lies
your shores wash off
break off my
nameless desert
skin I inhale islands
gaping my undulating
ivory bones
I lie
lost species of me
in mass extinction
I can’t fight this ocean cold
swelling my
blood like rain
glutting the belly of earth uprooting,
flayed forests
dark
not a lighthouse not a light
…
The Blood Pudding – November 10, 2025
Camilia (Camellia) Darwish is a poet, a mother, a student, a professional, and an artist—in no specific order. Her writing is inspired by the mosaic of cultures that shape her identity and by the belief that stories and poetry can sculpt our shared truths and reveal the deepest layers of the self. Her work aspires to hold a lens through which to closely inspect and wonder at the tiny threads and petals of life experiences, to open a door to a world flowing with magical stories, and to carry a canoe of inner histories through exploring themes of relationships, empathy, and belonging and giving voice to the unnoticed.
Artwork: Newton Scheufler is a visual artist, computacional artist, painter, graphic designer, illustrator, calligrapher, professor of Philosophy of Art, biologist, anthropologist, scholar, teacher, researcher. You can find more about him here.