Written in the Sand
I write the number of a new year in the sand
of a beloved beach and look across the direction
of the Atlantic, from where my relatives came to New York,
“on a ship,” my father lovingly says.
As a New Yorker who’s most carefree cruising an ocean,
I understand his love of the sea,
this feeling that your spirit is at peace being
in different places at the same time.
Like the majesty of Long Island’s rocky north shore,
and the wildness of its sandy south shore,
I am both calm waters as well as a wilder vision of waves.
My soul is both immigrant and native here.
And, at the same time, I can walk about this place
outwardly typical, and inwardly truly divergent.
These constant dualities most often live kindly
together, inside me, a cue I take from another
Long Islander who preceded me: as Whitman
proclaims: “Very well then, I contradict myself.”
Perhaps he, too, felt the vast liberation this island
can provide, in its own dualities, with its own two shores.
I look down at the numbers, the promise of a new year,
as it’s now washing away with the tide.
I whisper to Walt: I now know that in a place like this,
we may write in the sand, yet our fate’s not sealed in the stars.
At any given moment in time, we can all be so many things here—
untypical, audacious captains of our futures.
As night nears, I see his shadow walking beside mine and hear
his echo singing that we belong, on this island we call home.