When the container ship went aground in the middle of the Suez,
we all paid a price. The Japanese owner, under a Panamanian flag, Taiwanese
operator, German manager and Indian crew, stalled in Egyptian waters. A ship
too large to imagine, laden with the mundane and the necessary, our hunger
for things fed by people we will never meet, with families who are always waiting.
All vessels have names, even a container ship whose utilitarian appearance
does not elicit poetry. Ever Given. Blood oranges, mahogany, lemons,
coconut milk, computer parts, nails. Behind the grounded ship, smaller
ships filled with cattle, deemed “excess,” entombed and transported
not to populate, as after the Great Flood, but to die. They lowed
in their boat coffins, and on the walls pharaohs and slaves, deities,
jackals, cats and crocodiles turned slightly towards the lowing
as Hathor, briefly, shut her cow eyes.
The complexity of the voyage might cause one to sit,
for a moment, and consider that
our lives pass through many hands,
and every vessel has a name.
