The Wild Way

THE WILD WAY

by Lauren O’Donovan

My cottage can hear the midnight ocean
tides bring jetsam, seaweed, and shells
to submissive miles of fine white sand
bound by water, dune, and sky.
Winds blow doubt from my soul,
in the emptiness before dawn I am alive.

The town is asleep but I am awake
to hear wisdom whispered by the ocean
while her whitecap angels strip my soul
to redress with seafoam and oyster shells.
Under dark clouds performing dawn sky,
I walk alone on wild, west-coast sand.

Mermaid toenails sparkle in the sand,
half-buried and dead but in my hand, alive.
Tiny nacre caves capture suns from far sky
to sink their purple flames in mother ocean,
but the oystercatcher and shell collector
have other plans for lost aquatic souls.

In my cotton bag where plastic has no soul,
jingle iridescent petals plucked from sand.
The tinkling chimes sing: shed your shell,
surrender self, connect to life.
I submit and join the dancing ocean
in adagio chassé beneath a bouquet sky.

Wet strand reflects the birth of morning
interrupted by another early soul:
a local breaking day beside her ocean.
She stops me as I bend to pick the sand,
I share I am again glad to be alive
and on his grave will grow a rose of shells.

She says it was these selfsame shells
mothers sought beneath a long-set virgin sky.
Still young and soft and to the top with life,
children foraged baskets full of shellfish souls,
then laughing barefoot over rocky sand dunes,
they drifted home like gifts from the ocean.