Sea-shells

I gathered shells upon the sand,
Each shell a little perfect thing,
So frail, yet potent to withstand
The mountain-waves' wild buffeting.
Through storms no ship could dare to brave
The little shells float lightly, save
All that they might have lost of fine
Shape and soft colour crystalline.
Yet I amid the world's wild surge
Doubt if my soul can face the strife,
The waves of circumstance that urge
That slight ship on the rocks of life.
O soul, be brave, for He who saves
The frail shell in the giant waves,
Will bring thy puny bark to land
Safe in the hollow of His hand.

--  Edith Nesbit (1858-1924), English poet and children's author

In the Islands

Parents had gone where parents go,
except for Mrs. Pocket, who sat against a log,
engrossed in a paperback, smoking a Lark
and tugging absentmindedly
her swimsuit's oily strap.

Our minor wounds stung by dried salt, we were surprised
how far the kelp had been dragged up,
left like silage from a great combine.
Crows hawked in the Douglas firs,
their inland world dense and inaccessible,

so I and the other children stayed on the open beach,
towheaded, curious, and bored.
Some rocks we could overturn, and there
we subjugated neighborhoods of tiny crabs
who scampered from the light.

Between our playing and the woods
the bones of old trees bleached by the Sound
were heaped as if in the aftermath of battle.
I crawled inside a rack of driftwood,
pretending it was home.

By now, insinuating tides have tugged it apart.
Mrs. Pocket finished her book, and sometime later
died of cancer. Her daughters have grown up,
no longer the crabs' tormentors.
We've all been changed,

drifting into new configurations
and seldom taking time to watch the light.
But we remember boredom,
the pleasure of letting says go nowhere
till something called us home.

--David Mason (1954- ), American poet and librettist, poet laureate of Colorado, 2010.