Now for the first time we see the grey waves of the North Sea
slapping the distance beyond the ship, the sound, if you will,
of slate. God in the fog and listing, the misting mime-
white horizon and sheep. Rubbing their wool-thick
shoulders with others on the slopes at Nordfjord.
Touch one, says the man, and be switched.
There’s nothing wretched in being anonymous,
nothing disgraceful in being, as speedwell,
just one of a low-rising other. The long straight light-
lines curve, the waves send no lone gull up,
no puffin. The vista’s complicit, ice-
water a primer—a leveller, says the man. The lower I am,
the truer my place. We gather on the upper deck at midnight,
tip our faces skyward—waiting to be amazed
by solar wind & swirling shimmer.
Elana Wolff writes from the ancestral land of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations in Ontario, Canada. Her Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz, received the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture. Her poetry collection, Everybody Knows a Ghost, is forthcoming in 2026.