"Go to the rocks and the living will say hello." - Adam Nicolson, Life Between the Tides

One calming wave is followed by another and another and another until there is

a shift in attitude. How it all goes, generation after generation back and forth into the vastness,

A metronome tracking tempo. The salt water of shared bodies pulses through an electrical field

Held by gravity. Barnacles attach themselves to fossils.

The wandering cumulous clouds travel eastward on an exodus to the horizon.

The beach is strewn with shells of the dead, and most of the living will survive another day.

Before the Anthropocene and after, whether a hand guides pen to paper to record this eternal music,

the symphony of sun and moon, sea and stars, plays for celestial ears.

Who is listening?

The hermit crab seeks a new home. Seagulls, scavengers to the end, wander the abandoned beach

pecking at clam shells. They take only what they need and fly to the horizon. Their footprints will wash away.

All of it washes away.

Along the dunes, bees, desperate for food, sip nectar from the invasive beach rose.