Dear ******* the groyne,
Forgive the forgeries upon my memory.
Forgive the feebleness of my firsthand.
Forgive the feeding of my frenzy.
Forgive the freneticism of my prose.
Take truth from the diction of my lens.
I trust you will grant me a fair hearing,
And offer me the clemency of purpose—
To once more capture or conquer
The presence of Iris herself in your greens.
Grant me a jury of judicious witness,
The pounding of the gavel as grace
For the crime of picturing the presence.
I bid the remainder of my fruitless fall.
Dear ******* the groyne,
Has your blacksmith forgotten you?
Left to entice waves at shutter speed,
Forged in flame,
Chiselled and tamed on Vulcan high.
Through his neglect has the time arrived
To render and share for all or none—
As Pandora, of beauty, of curiosity,
Doomed to open the box
For me and my eye.
Dear the man on the beach,
Do you have any sense of shame?
As if the still frame holds the truest face
The gods of our minds do not claim to fame,
But cower and quiver with a shout of shrill.
I beam bounty in the rays of the sun,
Watching the groyne creak and stutter
As the waves breach and mutter—
A voice of too great dread to utter.
I sense your presence, your song,
The siren’s call to prayer.
The screech of the zoom and focus,
Lulling and drawing a sailor of despair.
But it cannot be enough
To return the green to my grey.
It is but a mirror of Death,
For the true beauty lies beneath the skin.
As the waves crash,
And the wind howls,
And the flash—
Our moment in time, you and I—
A fleeting visit in a luminal light,
Between silence and soul,
Of a tune forgotten in the sands of us.
Yet for the sea, a distant whisper
Of a moment—
The opening of a story.
Was it a moment of theft?
A moment of true witness?
Good enough to frame?
Was I truly seen?
Or just a clutch for transcendence?
And still,
The tide remakes the shore.
The groyne groans.
The flash fades.
You carry the image.
I carry the knowing.
We both were framed.
We both were fire.
This was a fun one. A dialogue between artist and subject inspired by a moment I took a photo of somebody on top of a groyne on the beach.
(Inspired by mythology, photography, and the sea.)
