34-37 Degrees South - 2023

‘Life’s a beach, and then you die’
Christine Sykes
Message on a banner: It doesn’t matter where you go in life...
as long as you go to the beach.
Standing on the foamy, driftwood littered shore,
after-storm waves lapping at my ankles,
I imagine a green-aged bottle.
Bobbing in the waves, pushed onto the wet sand,
drawn back into the swell, as if toying with me.
I reach—it disappears under the seventh wave.
The next one drops the bottle at my feet.
Touching the green slime glass. Lifting it to the gleaming sun.
Seeing inside a parchment scroll.
I twist turn the sealed bottle stopper,
wriggle wrestle the paper out and read the Sea Poem.
Message in a bottle: The meaning of life lies between the waves and the
shore.
It is both the beginning of earth and the end. There
in that split second, that infinitesimal space where sea meets land.
Now you see it, now you don’t.
The space shifts constantly moving with each grain of sand.
A whole beach oscillates, becomes hard, yet not fixed.
Water on rock. In the melee of motion,
the instant remains. Pure. Sparkling.
Catch it if you can—see
The depths of darkness. The lightness of being
The infinite in nothing. The lost and the found.
There it is. Now it’s gone.
46