The Price of Enlightenment

Have I, I wonder, finally attained
enlightenment? Today, everything is
as it is. The breakwater is just a breakwater.
The sea is just the sea. And the heron,

fishing in a rock pool, is nothing
more than a heron fishing, and the rock
pool itself is as clear as day. Why then is it
that I still long for the time when

the rock pool reflected my deepest
fears; the heron was the ghost of my father;
the sea, a boiling cauldron of water and salt, and
the breakwater, a border crossing

for the living and the dead?