Salty Blood

they say

greeks have salty blood

as if the tides course through their veins

and the waves remember them by name

my mother’s mother tasted the sea

before she suckled the teat of the land

as trojan horses galloped the swollen blue

crashing against poseidon’s hand

into a seafoam of myths and lulls

floating buoyant above the bones

of ancestors carved in coral and stones

sacrificed on the ocean floor

and their memory now but lore