Today's poem is by Sara Moore Wagner

Vacation
       

At the Carolina coastline, the sea
laps up to the sand in great gulps.
I want to burst
on this beach, be remade,
as Osiris. Instead, I put my children
to bed sticky with salt,
with bits of shell hidden in the follicles
of their hair. In the morning, the radios
are all playing some tired country
song about the ocean, about girls
in the ocean. When I stand
up to adjust my top, a man stops
to say hello. I want to know the right
words to heal this country on the edge
of this country—look out, I say,
over that big ocean is another world.
Remember all those ships
on this very shoreline, cutting through
it as birthday cake, not sharp,
not craggy, not a pumice stone, sweet
cake. On the other side of the ocean
is not another world. Look out.
We are born from both the sea
and the sand, trace our American
heritage to the Appalachian Mountains
of Ohio, that great melting pit of loss
which still in the tired hills contain
fossils of the sea, were made from sea.
Make our lineage coastline: there is here
and there is there, that great blue
which is somehow warmer than the air
above it. The man tells me predator
fish wait just beyond the sandbar.
Hello fish, hello sky, hello America, you
crowded beach of pushy people covered
in sunscreen, taking up more space,
claiming a spot early, playing your music
so loud it drowns out the sound of the gulls
crying mine mine mine mine mine.

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Copyright © 2023 Sara Moore Wagner All rights reserved
from Poetry South
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission