The Beach

I took my yellowish self and washed on the shore only to decay.
The waves struck without memory, erasing sweetness grain by grain.
Whales jumped from the water onto the land to lay beside the disappearing innocence,
carrying the weight of secrets too large to contain.

Beneath the foam, creatures with no names tangled and scattered,
their silence older than language, their hunger older than light.
They rose and fell with the tide, gills flooding, eyes unblinking,
as if the sea itself had exhaled and left them stranded.

We were lying, sun burning our bones in the sand, all of us,
a pack of no-name sea creatures left too long out to dry.
Salt clung to our skins, peeling away the last trace of sweetness,
until even memory began to taste of brine.

And still the horizon breathed, indifferent and eternal.
A border between fruit and salt, innocence and abuse, sun and sunset,
between breath and the fathoms that wait below,
where whales turn in darkness and the drowned dreams of creatures
drift like lanterns, waiting to be found