Acquainted with The Sea

|

Acquainted with

The Sea

A poem about permanence: how a place can enter the body and stay there. In “Acquainted with the Sea,” Georgia Shreve writes the ocean not as scenery, but as a force that becomes internal, physical, irreversible. The poem unfolds through a series of “once” statements, each one tightening the bond between experience and aftermath, until the sea is no longer outside the speaker. It is in her veins, her lungs, her bones.

First published:

May 28, 2019

Published in

In “Acquainted with the Sea,” Georgia Shreve writes the ocean not as scenery, but as a force that becomes internal, physical, irreversible. The poem unfolds through a series of “once” statements, each one tightening the bond between experience and aftermath, until the sea is no longer outside the speaker. It is in her veins, her lungs, her bones.

The voice is intimate and direct, yet the structure is quietly relentless: each stanza builds a new sense, a new kind of imprint, a new way the sea refuses to leave.

By Georgia Shreve

Once I had lived it,
It was in my veins
And in my lungs;
It was in my bones.

Once we had been
On intimate terms,
It drenched my nightmares,
Engulfed my dreams.

Once the voice of the sea
Was in my ears,
I could hear its cry
In every shell and open space.

Once the taste of it
Was in my mouth,
I would crave that
Briny sting forever.

Once I had known
The vastness of the sea,
Everything else
Was dwarfed.

Once I had witnessed
Its violence,
There would always be
Something wild in me–
Savage and sacred.

Reading Notes

What gives this poem its undertow is its insistence on after. Shreve doesn’t describe standing at the shoreline. She describes what happens when the shoreline follows you home.

The repetition of “Once…” works like a spell or a vow, each stanza a new proof that experience can become anatomy. First the sea is circulatory (veins), then respiratory (lungs), then structural (bones). From there, it moves outward into the psyche, where the sea “drenches” nightmares and “engulfs” dreams. The language is simple, but the effect is cumulative: the sea becomes a permanent climate inside the speaker.

The poem also travels through the senses in a deliberate sequence:

body → mind → hearing → taste.

And taste is where it becomes most revealing. The final lines don’t conclude with peace or closure. They end with craving. Not nostalgia, not longing, but appetite. The sea has become a need.

In that last phrase, “briny sting,” Shreve captures something essential: the ocean is not only beauty. It is sharpness, salt, exposure. The speaker doesn’t sanitize it. She wants it anyway. That is the emotional truth of the poem: some experiences mark us precisely because they are intense enough to hurt.