This Week's Poem

The Day Before

Today is no different
and will pass without a word,
will holler and vanish in a storm cloud
that in a season
will return us calm tides and birds.

The shells spiraling toward center
could as easily be heading away.
Is that not reason enough to rejoice?

*

What low tide lays bare
might not be expected
but someone once pitched
everything we find here into the sea,

making this act of rediscovery
its own strenuous abandonment.

*

If we could not remember
the day before
would the waves speak
a less weighty dialect?

Without history would its torchbearers
pine like the rest of us
for definition
and for an image of ourselves
tomorrow?

Without love’s deeds and its failures
would I be left wondering alone by the sea
why the severity of my hands?

-published in Arlington Literary Journal