All traces of winter are going now
as the snow clumps fade away
as we too can decline and vanish.
Our Dotty Brown died that way,
smiling, giving up her spirit, free to roam
out, out over the sea she saw every day.
Her soul, content, with her body stays.
Limitless, her horizon unbounded,
there is the sea, the great ledge boulders, and a lawn;
three horizontal bands, a simple view.
The moon, full that evening rose from the sea
at the center of the far edge in perfect symmetry,
as would the winter sun, red in its majesty
crack open the earth’s day / from its very center.
Water dominated Dotty’s view and her world;
blue placidity, or in grey whitened rage,
it surges in the frame of her ken.
A simple view, complex, changing, her sea,
the Atlantic, never stays still.
The Ocean’s voice beats incessantly
all day, all night, quietly moving little stones,
or booming and crashing against the ledge
sometimes bounding up on the lawn.
Here one feels the world’s pulse, the tides, the great cycles,
controlling all life, governing the earth justly, / not favoring us,
as the ocean’s warming rise will wash this all away.
At her end Dotty saw fewer and fewer fishing boats
sliding along her long horizon
saw fewer sea birds, seldom heard gulls crying,
saw the dwindling of life
in her cherished tide pools, and in the sea,
as our era surely ends.
3/26/2014