We Find Ways to Continue

Outer Space - SIX

“Welcome to my OUTER SPACE Blog where I share ideas and personal experiences even some art and writing samples.”

This poem is ALSO one of my own – called “We Find Ways to Continue” I wrote it about two friends of mine who died very young several decades ago. So, it is about death, but those deaths are memorialized in a familiar place to all of us. On an isolated beach. At the time it struck me that one feels a certain sense of solemnity on a beach. I am always at awe on beaches because of the vastness of it. And that always reminds me that there is a power greater than ourselves. Making the beach a great place to commune with your higher power whatever you believe that to be. And even if you do not believe in God a beach with it’s enormous seas and sands leaves one feeling small as they are among the sun, clouds & stars – there seems to be as many stars as there are sands – this poem takes place at sunset which is a metaphor for the end of ones life --

WE FIND WAYS TO CONTINUE

The wind leapt between a whisper and a sigh; Seizing the tufts of my pink gauze, shirt at every folded indentation; Caressing my body, wrapping cool grey sand,

Round and about my bronzed and buttered toes. As a receding torch of amber peach sunlight - Stretches from the horizon to the shore; Melting into the voluptuous curves of a tormented sea, Under a small orphaned cloud, near an abandoned castle, This is where she sings to me in her deepest blue velvet voice -- We find ways to continue As you and I breathe, the tide ebbs as it flow To mourn what has passed and to weep, to be reborn - As we feel it's sorrows letting go - To bathe us in its Sanctity’s Soul. MIXED Co. (Summer 1979)

This poem is very timely right now – Recently I lost my older brother to COVID 19 – well a few months ago. Easter weekend. He took AMTRAK to North Carolina at the height of the pandemic. The evening he arrived he lost consciousness and never recovered. At the time being able to go to the beach to speak to him once more in my soul or mind [since we could not have a funeral service] would have been very soothing to me. But for some reason in such a location one can feel he could hear me when I said my last goodbye. Such is the expansive, spiritual vibe one can feel on the beach – almost any beach - but especially one as desolate as the one mentioned in my poem. I have also created an animated short to illustrate this poem [above]. Enjoy!!