Sea Pebbles

Unknown

Sea Pebbles

My love, how time makes hardness shine.

They come in every color, pure or mixed

gray-green of basalt, blood-soaked jasper, quartz,

granite and feldspar, even bits of glass,

smoothed by the patient jeweller of the tides.

Volcano-born, earthquake-quarried,

shaven by glaciers, wind-carved, heat-cracked,

stratified, speckled, bright in the wet surf—

no two alike, all torn from the dry land

tossed up in millions on this empty shore.

How small death seems among the rocks. It drifts

light as a splintered bone the tide uncovers.

It glints among the shattered oyster shells,

gutted by gulls, bleached by salt and sun—

the broken crockery of living things.

Cormorants glide across the quiet bay.

A falcon watches from the ridge, indifferent

to the burdens I have carried here.

No point in walking farther, so I sit,

hollow as driftwood, dead as any stone.

Dana Gioia

"How small death seems among the rocks. It drifts/light as a splintered bone the tide uncovers." A beautiful but chilling line. 

 

The description of the stones, too, "blood-soaked jasper", "volcano-born, earthquake-quarried, shaven by glaciers, wind-carved..torn..tossed up..." is one of violence. There on the beach before him, the speaker sees a panoply of violence and death. 

 

And yet, there is something else, too. "The patient jeweller of the tides", who works the broken glass bits into sea- glowing gems, the forgotten, broken discards made mysteriously new/old, once common buttons or bits now uncommon, rare. 

 

The strangeness of shells, which, though nothing but remains, skeletons of once living molluscs, become something like pieces of art; sculpted minute monuments to the lives they once housed. 

 

This is how Time and the ocean work upon life and death. Curiously, with rhythmic alchemy, so that what was once merely a multitudinous brokenness, becomes a  treasure, a sign of hope. 

 

The speaker, though, sits among all this like a shell of himself, indifferent, unresponsive. 

 Is there hope that Time and the patient jeweller will do their work on him as well? 

 

 

 

 If stones can be made to shine, can broken humans be made new?

Beachcomber

Angie Lewin

Beachcomber

Monday I found a boot –

Rust and salt leather.

I gave it back to the sea, to dance in.

Tuesday a spar of timber worth thirty bob.

Next winter

It will be a chair, a coffin, a bed.

Wednesday a half can of Swedish spirits.

I tilted my head.

The shore was cold with mermaids and angels.

Thursday I got nothing, seaweed,

A whale bone,

Wet feet and a loud cough.

Friday I held a seaman’s skull,

Sand spilling from it

The way time is told on kirkyard stones.

Saturday a barrel of sodden oranges.

A Spanish ship

Was wrecked last month at The Kame.

Sunday, for fear of the elders,

I sit on my bum.

What’s heaven? A sea chest with a thousand gold coins.

George Mackay Brown

What’s Heaven? Hunting for beautiful shells and sea glass on the beach. I now understand the excitement of a storm, not just the storm itself, but the treasures it kicks up, the opportunities for discovery. This poem is for Janelle and Callie and all the other beachcombers I've come to know over the years. Here's to the hunt!

 

Snowstorm

E. Balfour Browne

Snowstorm

What a night! The wind howls, hisses, and but stops

To howl more loud, while the snow volley keeps

Incessant batter at the window pane,

Making our comfort feel as sweet again;

And in the morning, when the tempest drops,

At every cottage door mountainous heaps

Of snow lie drifted, that all entrance stops

Until the beesom and the shovel gain

The path, and leave a wall on either side.

The shepherd rambling valleys white and wide

With new sensations his old memory fills,

When hedges left at night, no more descried,

Are turned to one white sweep of curving hills,

And trees turned bushes half their bodies hide.

The boy that goes to fodder with surprise

Walks oer the gate he opened yesternight.

The hedges all have vanished from his eyes;

Een some tree tops the sheep could reach to bite.

The novel scene emboldens new delight,

And, though with cautious steps his sports begin,

He bolder shuffles the huge hills of snow,

Till down he drops and plunges to the chin,

And struggles much and oft escape to win--

Then turns and laughs but dare not further go;

For deep the grass and bushes lie below,

Where little birds that soon at eve went in

With heads tucked in their wings now pine for day

And little feel boys oer their heads can stray.

John Clare

John Clare is a master scene-setter. Reading this poem slowly, each detail appears vividly on my inner eye, and I come away with the sense of having experienced the poem’s world. I wonder, could a person who had never seen snow, have any true sort of understanding of it after having read this poem?

The Winter is Cold, is Cold

Amir Belhoula

The Winter is Cold, Is Cold

The winter is cold, is cold.

All’s spent in keeping warm.

Has joy been frozen, too?

I blow upon my hands

Stiff from the biting wind.

My heart beats slow, beats slow.

What has become of joy?

 

If joy’s gone from my heart

Then it is closed to You

Who made it, gave it life.

If I protect myself

I’m hiding, Lord, from you.

How we defend ourselves

In ancient suits of mail!

 

Protected from the sword,

Shrinking from the wound,

We look for happiness,

Small, safety-seeking, dulled,

Selfish, exclusive, in-turned.

Elusive, evasive, peace comes

Only when it’s not sought.

 

Help me forget the cold

That grips the grasping world.

Let me stretch out my hands

To purifying fire,

Clutching fingers uncurled.

Look! Here is the melting joy.

My heart beats once again.

Madeleine L' Engle

 

Snow and fire. Fear or trust. 

 

 

Where does joy begin?

Conches on Christmas

Antonio Cazorla

Conches on Christmas



Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this
barnacled pod so pales
next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales
that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss



except that there
was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells
silently, sans the heraldry of bells,
neatly, sans an astrological affair,



and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived—
an encrusted school of twenty-four
Gabriellan trumpets at my beach house door
and barely half-alive.



Oh, you can bet
I picked them up, waded right up to my ankles in
there among ’em, hefted ’em up to my ears to hear the din
of all things oceanwise and wet,



but every of the ancient, bearded, anthracite,
salt-water-logged spirals,
every of the massive and unwieldy, magisterial
mollusks shut tight—



no din, no horns roaring reveille, no warning, no beat, no taps,
no coral corpus,
no porpoise purpose
except it was a secret purpose kept strictly under wraps.



A fine Christmas gift indeed, this
obscure migration,
this half-dead conch confederation
which would have smelled yon tannenbaum like fish—



a fine set of unwrappable presents
and no receipt by which I could redeem them.
I lifted one up by its stem
and thought of how, by increments,



all twenty-four
must have lugged those preassembled bodies here
sans Santa, sleigh, and eight little reindeer,
to my drasty stretch of shore.



And, no other explanation being offered for the situation,
I thought that I might understand
how one could argue that the impulse driving them to land
was a sort of evolutionary one—



misguided, yes, redundant, a million years too late,
a needless, maybe rogue and almost campy
demonstration of how history,
even in the world of the invertebrate,



repeats itself—breaker
crashing down on breaker in the Gulf, Gulf War
coming after Gulf War.
O Maker,



there is so much slug inside these shells,
here, at the end of December,
at the edge of a world I couldn’t blame if you did not remember.
Miracles sell well,



but Lord, it can be numbing
to a people who cannot
tell between a second nature and a second thought,
a second chance, or a second coming.



Mike Chasar

A Meditation for Christmas

Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

A Meditation for Christmas

Consider, O my soul, what morn is this!

   Whereon the eternal Lord of all things made,

For us poor mortals, and our endless bliss,

       Came down from heaven, and, in a manger laid

       The first, rich, offerings of our ransom paid:

Consider, O my soul, what morn is this!

Consider what estate of fearful woe

     Had then been ours, had he refused this birth;

From sin to sin tossed vainly to and fro,

       Hell's playthings, o'er a doomed and helpless earth!

       Had he from us witheld his priceless worth.

Consider man's estate of fearful woe!

Consider to what joys he bids thee rise,

     Who comes, himself, life's bitter cup to drain!

Ah! look on this sweet Child, whose innocent eyes

       Ere all be done, shall close in mortal pain,

       That thou at last Love's Kingdom may'st attain:

Consider to what joys he bids thee rise!

Consider all this wonder, O my soul:

     And in thin inmost shrine make music sweet!

Yea, let this world, from furthest pole to pole,

       Join in thy praises this dread birth to greet;

       Kneeling to kiss thy Saviour's infant feet!

Consider all this wonder, O my soul.

Selwyn Image

“Consider all this wonder.” That has been the theme of this year.

Christmas

Unknown

Christmas

I had almost forgotten the singing in the streets,

Snow piled up by the houses, drifting

Underneath the door into the warm room,

Firelight, lamplight, the little lame cat

Dreaming in soft sleep by the hearth, mother dozing,

Waiting for Christmas to come, the boys and me

Trudging over blanket fields waving lanterns to the sky.

I had almost forgotten the smell, the feel of it all,

The coming back home, with girls laughing like stars,

Their cheeks, holly berries, me kissing one,

Silent-tongued, soberly, by the long church wall;

Then back to the kitchen table, supper on the white cloth,

Cheese, bread, the home-made wine;

Symbols of the nights' joy, a holy feast.

And I wonder now, years gone, mother gone,

The boys and girls scattered, drifted away with the snowflakes,

Lamplight done, firelight over,

If the sounds of our singing in the streets are still there,

Those old tunes, still praising;

And now, a life-time of Decembers away from it all,

A branch of remembering holly spears my cheeks,

And I think it may be so;

Yes, I believe it may be so.

Leonard Clark

in Time and Tide, December 1959