Kissing the Shoreline Goodbye

A Sestina

The sun peeks over the clouds to look at the sea.

This Tuesday morning, I peer like the sun out of my window of glass,

And finger the stem of a flower.

Too soon I’m pricked and there is blood:

I push the sides of the skin together to create a pool, a frame:

It reminds me of him bleeding from the mouth and the face.

 

The sand sinks soft and warm as I stare into the sun’s face.

My hand umbrellas my eyes, for they’re looking at all they can see:

The children are playing, the waves are swooping like flowers

Lain perfectly on the grave, reflecting like glass

All that has passed and the blood

Still remains in the frame.         

 

Sometimes, the children will scream, just like in the frame.

I scream too because I remember the face

Of the dead and of the gone, as the blood

Floats on top of the sea.

At other times, I stop and look at the waves of glass,

Remembering the smell of the flowers.

 

He was the sun, the moon, my daisy: a flower,

But now frozen in time, framed

In something quite solid and glass.

So that when days pass, I can still look at his face

And always see

Him without the black pruned mouth of blood.

 

A water droplet, thick and clear, spreads like blood

On my leg where, next to me, a flower

Of a child dries herself off from swimming in the sea.

She’s small and chubby, with thick frames,

And I look past her eyes to stare at her face,

Hoping to find happiness behind those glasses.

 

The sand, in organized mounds, creates a castle of glass

So fragile that its beauty seeps like blood

Down the walls of the castle’s face.

Someone has stuck a flower

On the top to brighten the beautiful, to frame

The solitude of a creation so it can be seen.

 

I saw in the sea what made my thoughts clear as glass:  

Isolation frames the forward life, no matter the spilled blood,

And, when faith flowers, the search begins for new faces.