Boat

Does anyone feel safe on the sea, nothing between us and the deep but a wooden platform, open keeled, powerless Eventually, the storm came, as it must, though there were no signs, no red skies or anvilled cloud, a hammer beating oars to splinters, shredding sails, the crew awash in despair. Still the exhausted teacher slept in the stern, so tired he could make a pillow of rough, coiled hemp, a bed of oak planks. Seasoned boatmen, helpless before elemental power, roused the slumbering teacher. Amid chaos, a word was spoken, not one of our vaporous wishes, but a word of power, erupting from a reservoir so absolute that only a word is required to put a raging sea to rest and silence a screaming gale. Now they were afraid. Of course they were afraid. When the world we think we know is literally blown away by a power that can’t be tamed, a new kind of fear washes over us, and we are unmoored into an unknown sea by a word.