Wrath of the Seas
Beneath the deepest ocean
Thou does reside
A monster of great proportion
That entangles you alive
With fingers waltzing violently
In rhythmic serpentine,
No fleet survived the fury of
The umbral ocean's queen
For her grip is one of steel
Her wrath merciless
Awakening the Kraken
Will be extremely...
Perilous
So soundlessly, the crew did work
From stern across the bow
For fear we'd rile thy fury, lurking
Deep beneath our prow
Alas, all efforts were in vain
Their fate already doomed
For within the whirling hurricane
The mighty Kraken loomed
Her tendrils snapped the mizzen mast
And lashed both crew and sail
We two live on as warnings
Of its ire. Thus, this tale.
Kraken Attack -- Joshua Carrenca
in German "Kraken" is the plural of octopus but also refers to a legendary monster that dwelt off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. In Norwegian "krake" refers to an unhealthy animal or something twisted , making it cognate with "crook" and "crank." In a late-13th-century version of the saga "Örvar-Oddr" (Arrow's Point)the hero's son Vignir described the creature as "the hugest monster in the sea. It is the nature of this creature to swallow men and ships, and even whales and everything else within reach. It stays submerged for days, then rears its head and nostrils above surface and stays that way at least until the change of tide. Now, that sound we just sailed through was the space between its jaws, and its nostrils and lower jaw were those rocks that appeared in the sea, while the lyngbakr [heather-back, as he called the kraken] was the island we saw sinking down." Carl Linnaeus classified the kraken as a cephalopod (Microcosmus marinus) in the 1st edition of his "Systema Naturae" (1735) but excluded it from later editions; in "Fauna Suecica" (1746) he referred to it as "a unique monster" though he admitted he had never seen one.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much Duane Vorhees for publishing our "Kraken" poem :) Love the image by Joshua Carrenca and all the kraken trivia- very cool! Thank you once more, Lynn
ReplyDeleteWow. This is fantastic!
ReplyDeleteVery good! :)
ReplyDeleteDawn