Shifting Sands Sublime

Beneath the appearance of things
behind the wonder that contemplation brings
there lies a universe of joy and pain
entrained upon whatever relics still remain
of a world colored by some eternal stain;
and wherever that stain remains
things are not and will never be the same
provoking some to surmise it’s just a game
that they can play and then refrain
from any effort to name
or explain.
And yet,
so many live for what they can get;
they allow no time to pause and let
life just happen along the way
so they can soon look back and say
what a joy it is to pause and stay
in the lingering light of a well-lived day
while the world just turns on come what may.
Oh, history breaks on sands far away
while here we enter into the fray;
we laugh or cry along the way
tomorrow and today,
I say, I say:
If I could comprehend this troubled world
so creative, yet destructively unfurled
I’d grasp the mystery, so sublime
that slaps between the sands of time
on this ever-shifting, long shoreline—

this consciousness of mine,
maybe it’s in or out of line
and maybe with a little sip of wine,
yes, I’d dream up some silly little rhyme,
and whether it be sublime and fine
or not worth a dime,
it nevertheless is mine,
and yet it can be thine
if you take the time.

King of Soul

Sand Beach

(With appreciation of Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach)

 

The Ocean is strong  today.

The waves roll in; the sun is bright

upon the Pacific. In this island surf the light

sparkles and tumbles; the rocky shores stand,

steadfast and vast, under a friendly sun.

Let’s do the beach; this afternoon’s energy is vigorous.

But hey! from this long splash of spray,

where sea meets the sun-kiss’d land—

Listen! we hear the pounding roar

of sand grains which the waves draw back, and fling,

forever, upon this high strand.

Beginning and ceasing, and then beginning again,

with a forceful rhythm it perseveres, to roll

The eternal resonance of wonder in.

 

Dear Matthew, back in the day,

heard this on the North Sea, and it brought

into his mind the ponderous ebb and flow

of our melancholy brood; we

hear it still the same; yet with that lamenting we discern

a reverberating of relentless purpose

in this pounding Pacific shore.

 

Oh sea of faith!

Persistent and unrelenting, all ‘round our earth’s shore—

you flap forever like folds of a bright banner unfurled.

Although I also feel

that ancient melancholy, the long, withdrawing roar,

retreating, in the breath

of the evening wind, laden with our roiling refugees

and the uncared-for masses of the world.

 

Oh, people, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

to boil before us like a pot of strife—

so disjointed, so distraught, so stubbornly the same,

really has somewhere some joy, love, and even flashes of benevolence,

some certainty— here and there a little peace— even some easing of the pain,

while we here on this fragg’ed globe

get swept with fake news and tweeting dweebs who incite us,

as ill-informed combatants clash with their devices.

 

Glass Chimera

Coast

Coast is clear

life is dear

without fear

now and here



World turns round

up turns down

some get lost, others found

life goes back to ground



Build the town

structures up, but they'll come down

lots of noise, then dearth of sound

still the world goes round and round



Another day, another turn

some will learn; some will burn

many earn and some discern

still the world doth turn and turn



Clouds rise up

life is tough

times get rough

lose some stuff



When all is said and done

we live and walk and speak and run

we feel pain but we find fun

until this present day is done.



What then?

Do it all again?

How about find a friend

in the one who died and rose again.

Glass half-Full

Crawling onto the sands of Time

If I had a pair of ragged claws
scuttling through surf-tossed sands,
I'd crawl up on this shellshorn beach.
I'd raise my thorny head
to see what I could see
to survey this continental conglomerate
that rises before me
like something big and fixed in time.
Whatever this is,
it is not akin to my ocean, no,
not in constant motion,
but something solid is it
something accumulated in time
something sedimented
into one big thing:

If I could drag me crusty self
upon that stony shore
I would find me windblown
wood grown structure there to rest
beneath its boney covering crest
and call meself at home.

But wait! What's this?
A thorny beast arrests me quest!
This spiny splort to thwart my sport!
Who goes there?

Declare yourself if ye be man or beast!
Shucks. 'T'was what I wanted least,
to share me beach with such a quilly guy,
to see me thorny self within his eye.
Pshaw! to put it politely,
'though I could use another word,
one that you have prob'ly heard.

Glass Chimera

shifting on the sands of rhyme

Here's a line in the sand:

surf breaking there, here shifting strand.

Out there swells planetary ocean;

it rolls in with universal motion.

This continent begins here, between my toes

with little grains that stretch to grandiose shows:

mountains untamed beyond cultivated grass,

miniscule creatures in habitats vast.



Who formed this strand I think I know;

It wasn't Michelangelo. No,

it wasn't Newton or Sagan or Copernicus.

'Though they played their part to show us

the dynamics of this present shifting locus,

it's no result of human focus.

Nor do our carbon-laden spewings

amount to any significant doings.



Our refuse is but momentary trash

sliding up on shores of civilizations past;

it comes, it goes, but no one knows

what bosons do beneath atomic shows.

If we think it's in our power

to determine planet emissions of any given hour,

then I've got some beachfront land to sell you

in Arizona; here, let me tell you.



CR, with new novel, Smoke, soon

Lover Beach

The Ocean is tidy this morning.

the tide is half; the sun comes up

over the swells; Lanai and Molokai loom

across the choppy blue. Old Maui volcano sleeps,

cloudy and vast, heart of the island.

Come to the veranda; bright is the sky!



Always, from the breaking waves

where Pacific pelts this sun-kiss'd isle,

Listen! you hear the roaring power

of our planet that flings up watery wings

and pulls them down again on shifting sand.

Roar, and whisper, and roar again

with cyclical slumber to lose and win

a perpetual thrust of planetary din.



Poet Arnold felt it long ago

among the pebbles of Dover beach, summoning

the futile strands of faithlessness

and existential woe; I

find instead the inevitability of faith

called up to bloom upon this far-flung ocean isle.



The ocean of despair

so near and far in present past, to pound us down on human shores,

throws its tantrum of pointless angst, with cynic sand.

But now I only feel the wave of our resolve

upon a flagg'ed pole of hope,

advancing, in the sun-stirred air

of dawning day, o'er the bright edges of our vision,

as lilies of the field.



Ah, love, let us be true

to one another! for the world, which seems

to pound upon us like a surf of strife,

so relentless, so provocative, so hard,

has a terrible power all its own

that would dash our love and hope in forceful blight.

But we here on our sun-bathed isle,

caressed with waves of love and delight--

we subdue the heartless poundings of the night.



Glass half-Full

The power of the universe

With impressive regularity, the moon orbits the earth every 28 days or so. This arrangement produces some very real effects on what happens to us and to our planetary home.


Long ago when I was in school, I learned that the mysterious white orb up in the night sky has a gravity of its own. Like every object that exists anywhere, it has a power to compel other objects in its direction. This gravity attribute of matter, which is proportional to its mass, is an important part of the mechanics of the universe. An intricate clockwork of physical events is constructed around it. Thanks to Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, among many other wise men who lived long ago, for figuring this out.

I suppose heavenly objects are a little like people in this respect--possessing a kind of magnetism that produces a sphere of influence. But among humans the attractive forces are relatable more to personality, leadership, status, charm, and such immeasurable factors, rather than a person's size, or what the physicists call 'mass'.

But I was thinking about the moon because of what happened two days ago when Pat and I were at the beach; it was a scary event that is indirectly related to the moon's orbit around us. Now as I write this the moon's glory is fading, as its master the sun renders it invisible while I watch the sun come up over the island of Maui, Hawaii. Being awake so early, I must still be on east coast time, even though its been a week ago since I was there.

But about the moon...Mostly we tend to think of gravitational forces between earth and moon in terms of the earth's greater gravity (due to its larger mass.) We see in the night sky the moon doing its thing, sort of hanging there night after night, seeming to travel an arc across the nocturnal sky as dusk pulls its curtain of darkness across the heavens, until dawn comes blasting all that blackness away, with sunny brightness and life-giving warmth.
We are forever accustomed to the fact that our earth powerfully determines the moon's behavior. But their cosmological connectedness works both ways. That little white sphere, so hopelessly tethered by gravity to its giant companion, exerts an unyielding, and quite predictable, effect over our worldy substance.

This dynamic is most easily observed in our oceans. Collectively, they are an immense resource that no one can measure. But the little old moon, even as small as it seems to us, pushes our oceans around like plasmic silly putty all the time, every day and night. That precocious dimpled satellite grabs, for instance, our largest planetary mass, the Pacific ocean, at one end, so to speak. As earth revolves, the moon fluffs its massive surface waters like a great oceanic blanket, wrinkling it all the way from Canada to Australia, crumpling it from Japan to Chile, and everywhere in between and beyond.

Tremendous physical forces of nature are set in motion through thousands of miles of water, producing the tides, the ocean swells, waves on the beach.

Right in the middle of all that lunar-induced force field of liquid dynamism is a string of islands we call Hawaii, which is where I now write this. Down there on the beach, which I am beginning to see again in the widening light of dawn, a wave crashes in the sand. It crashes because all that lunar-inflicted energy, which has passed in wave form across thousands of sea-miles, is suddenly resisted, and stopped, by a physical object--the beach. The mixture of energy in the wave--it may have been (guessing) 70% potential energy and 30% kinetic--is uproariously transformed into 100% (?) kinetic energy as it strikes the shore and dissipates.

A couple of days ago, Pat and I, fools that we are, happened to be standing in that Maui surf, when the awesome power of the universe, having been channeled by our feisty little tide-jerking earth-moon through the oceanic medium, came crashing against us with a force we had never heretofore experienced. The big wave came as the first among a set of whoppers; it whipped Pat and me around like rag dolls for a few fearful seconds. Having been caught clueless in a tenacious explosion of kinetic water energy, we were lucky to recover and walk away from its ferocity, back to our little beach blanket island of sun-screen and security.

Well, not lucky--actually, more like "saved." Saved by God, who is greater, and more benevolent, than all the jerky universe that stirs us around like fruity chunks in a beach-blender.
Do you think me naive to assume such a thing as God's protection in the midst of a terrible wave? It's okay. You may say that I'm a naive believer, but I'm not the only one. Another believer, one from ages long ago, wrote this about that same power of the universe, (from Psalm 93):

"The seas have lifted up, O Lord,
the seas have lifted up their voice;
the seas have lifted up their pounding waves,
mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea--
the Lord on high is mighty."

Glass half-Full