Hi Paul:
Greetings from Manhattan. The sight of the turbulent ocean powering shore at high speed is, for me, one of the great spectacles in nature. Here is the poem “Simpson’s Beach,” from my 2008 collection, Father of Water.
Best wishes,
Charles Pierre
Paul Goldfinger. © Atlantic Ocean. ©
Simpson’s Beach
By Charles Pierre
These transient sands, wind-shorn and washed
from a rootless coast, turn within the chaos
of the ocean’s dark and muscular currents,
its unstable waves, its momentary glints
and spray: the dispossessed grains sluicing
along lines of water that pulse within onshore
and longshore thrust, beneath the surf’s beat,
toward this barren spit of Atlantic frontage,
tossed up in great masses on its blank swath,
amid gobs of jeweled foam and tangled skeins
of spindrift: the sands cohering on this strand
only an instant, reshaped at the wind’s whim,
dispersed like dust in the sea’s unsheltered rush.
CHRISTINA PERRI “A Thousand Years.”