Poetry Friday: Beach Glass

This poem is appropriate for several reasons. We're at the beach, spending some time reconnecting as a family - precious time. All of us Americans are being reminded right now of the value and fragility of beaches and the ocean, and of the temporary nature of all that we love. And every day we, like the ocean, turn the same things over and over, over and over, and contemplate how to make a life out of what we have been given, which is enough - of course it is, and how blessed we are - but which is also, sometimes, so painful that all we can do is look for what is beautiful, and pick that up.



Beach Glass

by Amy Clampitt

While you walk the water’s edge,
turning over concepts
I can’t envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty
driftwood and shipwreck, last night’s
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
or touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.

Here's the rest.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.