courtesy driftwoodshores.com

for my son, far from home

Tides rise and fall, flow through
our western view opened wide
with windows that picture the moving
panorama of light, water, grass.

Floating hypnotically within
a mobile of driftwood assembled
on the eve of your departure for

college, memories of all the growing up
summers of sand and sea where you mooned
the waves, dripped castles and dug
after squirming crabs. All these gathered
gray shapes of memory float and turn,
reverse, revolve, never-ending tales of sea and time
like our beach bereft now of dunes, seasons
having carved new inland walls from sand,
rootless and undefended as the mobile.

How we circle, float, drift, return
tethered from one single thread
that moors us fast with love and grace
to our beginning sense of place.

– swb