The Institute of Nautical Archeology
By Shafer Hall
Does anyone at the INA have children?
I wonder if all of that time under water
makes you sterile, or more fertile, or
neither of the below. Below, there’s
time only for tides and octopuses
hiding in ancient urns, and the urn
and the octopus will argue about who
is the artifact as you tread, mouth agape,
trying to remember your grade-school
Greek so that you can say your prayers.
Tiny pieces of ancient vast and deadly
fleets dot the dark ocean floor beneath
Mount Athos like seeds, the dark silt
is fertile with history, not fear, unless
your fear is of the black ink of history,
which seems everywhere, says the
octopus, Herodotus, the pillar of
nothing that the INA can’t discover
in the textbook-page ocean floor
where the sad old octopus inks.
Shafer Hall’s first full-length collection of poems, Never Cry Woof, was published in February of 2007 by No Tell Press. He is a senior poetry editor at Painted Bride Quarterly and bartends in New York City. His poems and collaborations have appeared in the Indiana Review, Eyeshot.net, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and many other journals.
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Shafer - I loved your poem! Many of us have children, some older kids, some younger, and there are even INA grandchildren. We’re passionate about learning for all ages, and the magic of nautical or underwater archaeology starts for many when young - the bug bit me when I was 10.
I’ve been thinking we just adopt the venerable octopus as our mascot, maybe “Ina the Octopus” as that would give her a nice name.
Jim Delgado, Executive Director
Institute of Nautical Archaeology