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A Sunday Sea
Tag: The Sea
Upon A Second Glance
Upon A Second Glance
As frequent as blue moons and thousand year flood levels
Highly coveted is the second chance
I cashed in on the leventy leventh
One
My lab Wendy, English and fourteen
Blind and blonde
Crossed the street, narrow, often void of traffic
Mostly it’s the shrimpers who speed toward the docks
Their boats bear names like Mary Margaret, wait or don’t for their return
They dodge my girl, she can only smell them coming
Age has racked her sense and sensibilities
Leaving her with but one
She wobbles and plods, our paces are kindred
My beloved has dodged a million near misses
Intrigue lies in smells deposited on other sides
Not too far from home
She is cured of wandering
Wondering cannot be cured
And I have missed a chance or plenty more
To penetrate what lies right here
My eyes can cut the surface, or carve deeper still
Into those pleasant offerings of now
And just
Right here
I am guilty of hoarding them
This is my confession
Here, by the sea I learned to see again
I use the stars on bright nights
measuring stick whittled by grace
Barometer of gracious plenty
Far from a city with its blinding bulbs
I count and count and count
Again
Gazing back and gazing forth
I increase my chances of remembering
In all the double takes, exposures doubled in my
Mind’s eye
We run from dementia by running into joy
Recording Beauty is our defense
The hands that cup the sun
Cup me
On a second glance
Highly coveted is the second chance
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RSVP, Merci
RSVP, Merci
On the tip of the earth as I know it
I look out
Imagine more
Hidden, veiled in mystery
Concealed by cover of tan and blanket of blues
In a wink and a nod
I blink
It is all still there
The beautiful
Blows by, brushing by the strands of my windblown hair
I stare
And as the haunting, beguiling ghost crabs
I crawl, slow then quick step, padding through the heat
Weaving up and down, then back
A strategy to cover the breadth and depth and width
With these weaving
As I
Pass sediment on the shore
Waves shake hands with hot brown sand, as if it were
Flipped in the cast-iron skillet where the grease pops scalding
Hot
Vapors rise up in waves of heat-rising
Day is cooking herself under a blazing summer southern sun
I whisper and inaudible yes
Say yes to all this and more
There is a call in the barren places
Where I walk
And pass not a soul for a little long while
The sea is stingy this day
Giver of gifts on many a Sunday stroll
Tumbling treasures, teasing me
rolling gifts up and rolling them back
down, yo-yo style
Free-style
Playing with me
Tempting me to step one more step in search of more
surprise, it is not about that which I can touch or take
My hands may leave empty, today
But the attic of my soul will not
It is storing up
poetry
And I respond
It is collecting
art and beauty, dreaming of the soul-work
yet to come
Merci
To all my searching soul can see
Along this stretch of shore and life
I respond, with a song of Sunday gratitude
No more
Merci
It is all I know to do
++++++
Joining Laura Boggess
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Waxing In The Waning
I have not sought the moon this Spring. Intentionally looked up and made mental notes of its stage and size. Cycle and rhythms. Dimness and brightness. Color and stage. But I should be. Marking and noting. There are lessons there for me in the heavenlies.
Rather I have been looking down and to the side. Over and under the small spaces. Seeking the growing. Cataloguing the seed, the bloom and the fruits of the earth and of the the sea. Miniscule milestones in the garden and broken pieces of shells coughed up by the sea. Roughed up and beaten up and then honed into the beautiful.
Waxing in the waning is a banner over my life. Growing in the dimming. Increasing in the lessening. Smallness is wearing her beautiful crown. She is royalty and majesty. The paradox is grand. The center is a whisper, faintly wooing with her call to pause in the now.
I live on the cusp of exploration. Steps from the salty marsh where so much mystery hides in the folds. The waves weave a hiding place. The tides will unveil, pulling the curtain back for peaks. But stand guard, awake and present. Or you will miss much in the changing of the guard.
The dolphin break through the glass ceiling that is the glassy sea. Looking at us as we strain to study their graceful acrobatics. A day is labeled wonderful if we have spent time with a pod. Or even a mother and her young. We are students of the sea. Since I was a child, I have been near in my soul or body or both to the place of salty mystery. Everything is new. Again and again. I remain a child at the seeking of pieces of joy hidden, then revealed. Revealed and then hidden.
Before I even touch the snow pea to my lips I have savored goodness with my eyes. This is just the crescent. But the crescent is enough. The moon in all her fullness. The pea at her ripest, cooked or raw, eaten or not. Archiving the now, fully alive, fully awake fills us with His goodness. Seeing the holy moments. The holy in the moment. Touching and smelling. Seeing and tasting all that He has created brings us closer to the Creator. And that is where abundance is poured out. Every blade and seed, He made. Every dolphin nose. Wet and sleek.
There is a waning to my years. I do not recall the glory-filled details of much of my living from long ago. I come from Dementia. My mother, my grandmother and my aunt have known it too well. And I may be traveling toward Dementia. I may well be in the line of that fiery disease.
But I am going down fighting for a magnificent, magnified view of the poetic now.
And there is a moon and there will always be a moon. And she will meet me in the heavens tonight. This I know.
For now.
elizabeth w. marshall 