[Martin Elster]

If You Could Be a Beach

If you could be a beach composed of sand
Or shingle buffed and rounded through the eons
Or fragments of the shells of tiny peons
Of hydrospheric life, you’d understand

The feel of being tread on by the feet
Of bipeds (bird or human), being pecked
By beak, or surf-caressed, claw-scooped, or trekked
Across by sauropod and solar heat.

You’d hear the piping plover’s piccolo,
Be tickled by the trotters of crustaceans
Or, on occasion, bear the agitations
From heaves that cause the coasts to overflow,

Reaching to pinnacles where birds of prey
Survey the waves erasing nesting sites
Of turtles which, in Earth’s scheme, have no rights
(At least not when her lithosphere’s at play).

But what if you were you beside the sea,
Basking in the sun one afternoon
When Earth, for sport, decided she would spoon
Some brine atop your head? Where could you flee?

Better to be the beach and lick the salt
Rushing across your shelly, rocky tongue
Tingling from such cyclic thrills among
The rise-and-fall beneath the heavens’ vault.

— Martin Elster
(27 Nov. 2010)