What You Don’t See

 

Walk oceanside: gulls forcing wind under-wing,

the children, sand caressing their youth-polished feet,

amidst rapture, call outward in stammered squeals as their undisciplined skin

laps against the sweet, moving water…summer tanned stomachs vanish,

shoulders, then the juvenile haircuts under the sprawling, ebbing tide.

The vast green line of the Atlantic meets at the ineffable blue horizon,

a child never realizes, their existence is infinitesimal,

and the ocean blooms and croons for their youthful egos. 

 

An unwelcome wind breathes through his locked windows.

With gelid fingertips it jostles his hair and blushes his cheeks.

It overturns a paper cup with a milk-rotted, Oreo base,

and sways the dancing curtains, revealing the obscured outside.

The sky is plaintively gray, buildings are gray, concrete is gray,

the people are gray, the trees are gray, and this is “beautiful.”

Imagine never seeing the ocean; beauty is a foreign tongue, 

and never has a salt blast blessed this town or the faces of it’s people.

He yearns for pained, sandy blusters, and his burning, salted, adolescent eyes. 

 

What you don’t see, what you’ve never seen is

the ocean in your lover’s eyes, the writhing tides,

and the mirthful shoreline’s scattered shells.