NATURE Poem: The Ocean Didn’t Ask, by Melba Morel

The ocean didn’t ask
why I came crying.
It just opened—
wide and salt-skinned—
and let me break.

No permission needed.
No diagnosis to explain.
Just waves
rushing in
like they already knew
what I had lost.

I stood there,
ankles buried in grief,
hands full of
nothing
but the ache of what never came.

The seagulls didn’t pity me.
The sun didn’t pretend
to fix what was broken.
They just stayed—
present,
still,
true.

I whispered names
I was never allowed to say out loud.
Let the tide
carry them somewhere soft.
Somewhere holy.

This is what the earth does—
it holds us
without needing a reason.
And still,
we call ourselves barren
instead of beginning.

But I have bloomed here.
In salt.
In silence.
In the soft rhythm
of being
alive anyway.