Mirror, seashells, clear blue glass bottles
Tinkling windchimes
The smell of the sea breeze
Fragments forgotten by the ocean
left as traces of her short term memories
stranded on beaches
like illegitimate children longing to be reconciled
to that detached past
Picked up by foster parents scouring the wasteland
Where crows pick around for food:
like old placentas shed
left to dry and stain the ground.
As crabs burrow their way in and out of these trinkets.
Here’s an old watch a father once lost while teaching his son how to swim
There’s a plastic bottle which temporarily quenched the thirst of young girl in pink bikini
And look, a piece of jagged stone which once stood proud on a mountain
castrated
Washed out by rain
Baptized by the sea
floundering in frictions between the wave and the sand
pushed by currents half way across the globe
tossed by the pull of the moon
finding its way onto an insignificant island coast.
Where it still beckons to the mountain
its lost vital part.
While the mountain forgets and heals its own loss.
The jagged stone waits and remembers
as its memory is worn thin
with the coming and going of the tide
A young girl picks up this jagged stone
flings it back into the sea
watches as it gets swallowed up in that collection of displaced memory.