✨ Gleanings
wonderful alchemists...
Gleanings
Ocean Grove, New Jersey
Look at the two of them, bent
to the early morning tide.
Culling glass from the gritty surf.
Strange and wonderful alchemists,
who search for the elusive blue
of medicine bottles, caressing
emerald imitators from “Old Latrobe,”
or amber sea urchins
left there like whelks at low tide.
They discard broken bits of crockery,
forsaken jetsam of the sands.
Beach glass is opaque
with a false clarity:
Polished by sand and sea,
the edges don’t cut
like our lives, lived elsewhere,
out beyond the last sandbar,
where plate tectonics rule the waves.
—Scott Edward Anderson
(for Diane Stiglich & James Supplee)
From Fallow Field, Aldrich Press, Copyright © 2013. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by Dawid Zawiła, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.
Oh, as the water girl, I do love this poem! And sea glass. These lovely lines cut through
...Polished by sand and sea,
the edges don’t cut
like our lives, lived elsewhere ...
and the poet knows of the jagged basalt shores out near the tectonic plates.