Times of the Islands Summer 2022

CHALK SOUND
It’s the silence of the morning that makes you still, before the wind picks up and whips itself to a frenzy, devoid of
all sense and purpose. Before the wind there is the silence, loud and strong, firm to the touch.
The silence waits, as if it expects some vulgar interruption, something that will shatter it to pieces,
something that will expose it, helpless, and broken.
Chains of islets, like some prehistoric herd of rocky mammoths, large festooned mothers,
strong fathers bare and exposed, infants, toddlers, those almost grown stand in lines as if time has stopped
and they await the next catastrophic event of nature to startle them into motion.
The Sound protected by the resistant barricade of the island outline shelters restful waters,
azure blue, green, grey moved by some invisible current in a gentle dance
with seaweed and moss on their bed of white rippled sand to nurture the life it holds.
But yet there is an interruption, it is the intimate sucking and gurgling of the cradled waves
as they gnaw at the shoreline etching away at the vulnerability of the rock
creating disfiguring potholes and edges sharp to the touch.
Waves burrowing under reaching inland through intricate passages beneath.
Here the spirit is at once quietened and revived charged with some new energy
drawn from the pristine stillness, from the pause in time!
This poem was written by Tal Stokes’s mother,
Dr. Blossom O’Meally-Nelson Stokes.
Photo by Ramona Settle.