Life's a Beach
A poem I wrote today, about today.
So, today—
Just as I’m thinking about how
We could both use a reminder
That good things can happen
—The cackling wind
Steals my hat from my head,
Hurls it
Across a hilly seashell graveyard
(Ooh, Aah, Ouch!)
All that jagged seabed detritus
Nips the disused soles
Of my fragile, fumbling feet
All the way to a soft-sand reprieve
Where—blast!
She gusts against my back, again
That crackling wind
Kissing the gnawing break
Of the ripping tide
(In and out, in and out)
To relay this ball cap of mine
To her clever accomplice,
Wearing red Sargassum threads,
The ocean, that bitch,
Catches my hat in foamy lips,
Swallows with her slurping tongue,
Ruminates rhythmically,
At last burps the cap back to me
(Gee, thanks, soaking wet)
But—what’s this?
Rolling here at my feet
In a churning cauldron of sand and sea?
A perfect lightning whelk shell!
Spire like vanilla soft-serve
Lined with chocolate fudge sauce,
Crowning a pointy waffle cone helix,
Left-hand spiral, magical, unmarred
Funny clockwise twist,
This sinistral gift.
Yes! I’ll bring it home to you,
It'll live on our bay window—
I ought to check for critters, though
Rather than murder then enshrine
A dried mollusk carcass, accidentally
(How grim)
So I plunge my finger into the shell’s
Slick pink cavern,
Softer than glazed porcelain,
Searching,
Scraping out little sandy bits
From reachable crevasses,
But because my hair hangs free now it
Whips, flaps,
Flattens against my face,
(Blindfold, betrayer!)
I turn my head
To where the orange sun sits
The wind, she
Pushes hair from my eyes and—
(Oh my!)
I cease my whelk invasion at once
For now, I see
I have plundered and provoked
The secret hide-y hole
Of a wee baby octopus
Whose curious gaze peeps up at me
As one brown tentacle,
The breadth of a pine needle,
Wriggles and draws squiggles
Upon mine own finger,
An angel kiss so delicate
That my skin couldn’t sense it
And my eyes, they would have missed it,
If not for the wind
Whispering against my cheek,
Look now:
I gave you something good,
Keep only the memory.
About the Creator
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olive juice
to the one scraping mold off the AC coils: i see you wearing your toils. i see you when you refuse to get embroiled in the ploys to act disloyal, forgiving my recoiling and looking past my foibles. i see you out there plundering for spoils on a prayer to live like royals, but you just keep getting foiled by all this modern turmoil so, hey
By Morgana Millerabout a year ago in Poets
Comments (3)
The serendipitous magic of the moment. In my first appointment, serving two United Methodist Churches in Missouri, I found myself driving on a Sunday morning to the early service out in the country. A heavy fog lay upon the ground but above the sky was clear. The sun was just cresting those earthbound mists as I came around a curve & there, in the clearing between the road & the trees, I saw the end of the rainbow. At church that morning I told everyone who had gathered that there is indeed a pot of gold at rainbow's end. But the gold is not of worldly wealth. It is in the wonder. The tender embrace of a tiny octopus upon your finger, I can only imagine the pot of gold--the wonder--you experienced in that moment. Beautiful, tender, serendipitous, sweet & filled with the most wonderful sense of wonder. (How's that for poetic doubling?)
I love how you turned quite a simple chain of events into this mini-adventure. The commentary was first-class and made me chuckle, and there is just so much to unpack from this piece that I would seriously be here all day, haha! Instead, I shall just pick out this bit - "The ocean, that bitch, Catches my hat in foamy lips, Swallows with her slurping tongue, Ruminates rhythmically, At last burps the cap back to me (Gee, thanks, soaking wet)" Love that little section and the detail you use to describe checking the shell. So so good, Morgana! I also agree with LC, you made the shell seem so tasty. 😀
You made me want to eat the seashell. That's talent that is 😁