Man’s Detritus
Cast high
With crisp seaweed
Under the bleaching sun.
All is soluble
In the end,
For the solvent
Washes twice a day
And more
In salt air
Corrosion.
Metal is eaten
Mottled bite
By rust smudge
And leafy fragmentation,
And plastic twine
Frays and becomes powdery.
The plastic bottle too
Loses integrity,
Degraded by the claiming sea,
Scrubbing every edge
To the smooth curve of bays
And roundish pebbles consistency:
Perhaps mocking us
For our solid forms
And legacies,
Our memories
Held aloft and alive –
To never die:
Or perhaps treating us
As equals on the path
To unbecoming
And the endless tide
Of things passed
And passing
To the voluminous being:
Then from dissolution
And constituents floating,
Reformation
Of something new and free.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.