A lazy Thursday morning
When life is but a stroll in the sand
With the river flowing out
The waves rolling in
Very breath of Earth
As we all take a welcome sigh
In advance of the hodge-podge concerns
The day will all-too-soon offer
May I carry that sigh of the sea
Into the coming hours
Breathe in waves of beauty
Let the day’s worries flow from my earthly body
The only weight I’ll bear
Left behind on the beach
Footprints in the sand
Hers was an exquisite beauty
Not the kind to command
Covers or runways
That puts a name
Up in lights or lead a headline
Her beauty commanded a second look
The kind you missed on a first take
And yes, it was there on the surface
But more, it ran deep
In her bearing
In the way she made others
The center of her world
Her smile flowed
From every feature of her being
To receive one was to be blessed
The first time
She gave me that gift
It was through a tangle of locks
Tossed about in the wind
The sound of breakers far below
My heart knew only one person
In the entirety of existence
And it took years to convince it
That there were other smiles in the universe
Some time after I’d grown beyond the desire to possess her
Our group of friends retraced that old road trip
And on this same point, through tousled locks
She gave me again that heart-stirring smile
But this time said
“I think I am falling in love with you.”
Bruised
Scarred
Burnt
But OK
I spit sand and salt
From my parched mouth
Then
Hunger
So up now
Onto the roiling sea of dunes
With their smaller wavelets
Of grasses in the wind
From the tallest
Scan up and down the shore
Only waves of ocean and grass
And the tidal strip of sand between
Inland
A barren of pines
Obscures whatever topography
Or structures
May be beyond
At the forward fringe
Where dunes meet forest
Thin
Scraggy
Scattered
Windswept trees become soon enough
A thickly boughed and wooded
Ideas without a tide
Or a beach to wash up on
Soaring on an unseen wind
I am adrift in a familiar peace
The pleasures of moments lived fully
On sun and sand excursions
Whether accompanied or
As preference sometimes won out
An adventure of solitude
Before long
The harsh admonishments
Of sun and wind take their toll
And while chewing my lip
In meandering thought
A chapped bit of it tears away
Leaving the taste of iron
The sting of revealed dermis
The elements have reduced my options
To an accommodation with mortality
Move or die
Shade or die
Moments
Joyful and Solemn
Solitary and frolicsome
Beaches
Body and nature intersect
Spirit and being mingle
And I on my buffeted perch
Witness to all this tumult
Moved, again, by wonder
Shimmering waves
This cloudy night
The stars have failed
In skies too bright
Peace besets me
In this dwindling hour of daylight
Content with the cool darkness to come
The surf
The gulls
The sand
The wind
The sky
The emptiness of a beyond
Reaching further
Than the distant horizon
But there is no such sea here
So when I want the sea
I draw a slow, very deep
Breath in
Close my eyes
And release
Slowly
The breath
And my presence
Here
Now
Release my presence
Begin to breathe deeply
I listen for the waves
And hear them
In time with my breath
I listen for the gulls
And hear them
My thoughts glide away on their wing
I scrunch my toes in the sand beneath my feet
And feel it between them
Grounded, solid as the Earth
I open my chest to the wind
And it washes over my body
Filling my lungs, my being with life
I raise myself up to the sky
And bask in the warm sunlight
It feeds the light within
I am transported there
To the shore of the sea
I release
All that is not this moment
Let it take wing
Like the gulls
Watch this flock of attachments
Fly beyond the distant horizon
Then disappear behind it
I sit here
With the sea
With the emptiness
In the emptiness
There are only the waves
Which are my breath
Storm abates
Combatants retire
Skies clear
Calm returns
Pix to Words 