The Blue Ordeal: A Poem on Existence | Thursday Verse No. 10

  We often imagine our lives as a steady passage through time. But what if time isn’t a line at all, but a spiral pulling us deeper into its own whirlpool? Would immortality still feel like a gift? 

  To sink is not always to perish; sometimes it is to see, to feel the enormity of what holds us, and to recognize how small we truly are within it. 

  The Blue Ordeal is a descent into an eternal stillness, where time halts, sound fades, and the self dissolves into the vastness of the unknown.

The Blue ordeal

Digital illustration by Mercy Rebonica.

Splash! Tearing the surface tension I sank into blue profound,

My buoyancy taken away by a gash of warning-less wind I knew I had lost ground.

As I drowned deep, deep and deeper, cosmos abruptly froze,

Time obstinate to stop, ticked without a pause;

With every footsteps of the ticking clock, everything began to unfreeze,

But the water that enveloped me, refused to set me free.

I stroked water by mustering all my preserved youthful strength, 

Later did my sense open to the fruitlessness of my actions,

Soon my will and efforts were proved futile, 

When I moved not an inch—low or high.

Held in the throat of immense ocean, 

I touched no surface or hit no bottom;

Water, pain, and filled every cells of my organs,

The jeering waves intensified the wretchedness of this condition,

Even the thinnest beam of sun was obscured by sea-monsters,

At this point, immortality emerged not as blessing but a curse.

Time ignorant of all this, hummed its monotonous song,

And this tormenting despair seems to prolong.

- Mercy Rebonica