On a bed of wet sand and seaweed left behind
by the receding tide rests
a seashell,

A testament to survival of even the softest forms of life,
now fractured and empty but
still beautiful.

Press it to your ear and listen closely. Can you hear?
That distant roar like crashing waves?
The ocean? No, it's

A song sung in low, muffled moans, a lamentation for the
hollow space inside that was once called
a home.

Lamentation for an existence that once held purpose,
to protect and defend seekers of shelter as a
glistening shield, not

A shell too cracked for all but the most desperate of
hermit ***** to hide in for more than
a moment.

The seashell weeps, for it can do nothing but lie,
beautiful and useless and
broken,

Crying too softly to be heard
except by those who
stop
to
listen.




Until the day when a warm, gentle hand scoops it from its
lonely bed of sand into a bucket with
reverence and care

To take it to a place far from the ocean's teeming depths and
the beach's salty shore,
perhaps

To be ground to luminescence and serve as the star
of eye-catching jewelry that frames the face like
a work of art, or

To adorn the sand castles of children that will inevitably be
washed away, though never forgotten, like
childhood itself, or

To be a cherished memento of that day when you tossed your
fears into the sea and walked away with a sunburn and a
fit of infectious laughter.

The seashell weeps, cradled in its simple plastic bucket,
a ferry into the unknown where perhaps,
perhaps

That which is
hollow and
broken is
not
useless.