I was born of Pacific waters
bathed in their colors of stone and sky
swam their frigid swells and troughs
to return awakens my heart’s connection
to walk the firm yet yielding sand
to wade knee-deep through the rip
to comb a fiver’s worth of unbroken dollars
to have my ankles caressed by sea foam
to greet the sunrise and kiss the sunset
to hear my father’s words echo
“Never turn your back on the ocean”
though I do, if only to see my world
as the ocean views it
a dark forbidding challenge
to its unparalleled power
the Pacific is the edge of my existence
it flows in my veins
it nourishes my soul
Posts Tagged ‘beach’
Birthplace
Posted in Creativity, Poetry, tagged beach, creative writing, modern poetry, Pacific ocean, Poetry, Writing on 03 Oct 2025| 1 Comment »
Winter’s Edge
Posted in Low Tech, Seattle, tagged beach, nature, Ocean Shores, quiet living, vacation, Washington State, willow twigs on 14 Feb 2013| 1 Comment »
Our drive west to the ocean is quiet, the road hissing beneath our tires, the drizzle hiding the greater world around us. It is just us, the dashed stripe down the pavement, and the last vestiges of winter along the highway’s edge.
Washington is the Evergreen State, and it is always, ever, green; winter or summer, rain or sunshine, something is always green. In this season, it is the cedars, pines, firs, and spruce. They covered the hillsides and the slopes between us and the limits of the grey-misted world: tall, shaggy, dark green sentinels ranked in thick forest ranks, or short, stripling, pale green youngsters rising from the steaming refuse of clear-cut acreage. But not everything is green.
A Wing of Plovers
Posted in Low Tech, Seattle, tagged beach, gearing down, murmuration, nature, plovers, quiet living, Seattle, simplification, vacation on 18 Oct 2012| Leave a Comment »
They don’t have a cool collective noun like “a murmuration of starlings,” but they were enthralling nonetheless.
Yesterday, I stood on the beach while a wing of plovers gyred and swooped around me. I stood transfixed, my feet freezing in the cold water, watching them, hearing the whispers of a thousand wings surround me. They flew as one creature, sides flashing like a school of fish in clear water, black wings, white bellies, gyring and twisting as one, creating shapes in the air above the sandy waves.
They rose in a mass, split into two amorphous shapes, each one moving around the other, until they merged like droplets of quicksilver. They spindled into a long roll and swept across the sand before piling up again into a heap, a mound, a pillar fifty feet tall.
As the wing spun and eddied, individuals would fly off from the body, peeping as they shot outward, slate-winged rockets ejected from a massive, living firework.
And then they settled, falling like heavy leaves back down to the sand, the rustle of wings replaced by a piping chorus that drowned out the roar of the surf. The wing of plovers in the air, now a congregation on the shoreline, dipping each black beak into the sand, searching for food, skedaddling back and forth in time with the waves until the ocean sent another big roller to make them take wing once more.
I stood there for the better part of an hour, rapt, giddy, grateful.
k
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 