The tide turns,
a stream flows down the sand, joining the incoming waters.
Children try to build dams and castles, as children do,
but I watch the patterns caught in the sunlight.
Soft lapping lattice on clear liquid ripples
Sheer sunlit slivers of sand wrinkled water;
a river of wavelets, meeting and merging,
chameleon changing, criss-crossing, verging,
winding and widening down to the sea
that is pulling and pulsing the watery veins
into the ocean, down to the deep again.
The swell of it, smell of it, the strengthening wash
of the waves that will turn and smother and smash,
moon finger quick sands under my feet.
Ripples and ridges submit and retreat
swallowed up whole by tide-turning reach
drowning sandcastles on Poly Joke Beach.