Leaving the Seashore

Today, I head home to Vancouver from Pacific Beach. I plan to spend a few hours touring the City of Olympia.  

I collect poems, quotes, and sayings about life by the sea: Reflections of Beachcombers.  

Here are a few of my own poetic reflections:

From Slices of Time

The arrow of Time never rests,
    moving forward unrelenting
         irreversible
from hot towards cold
from organized to disorganized
from past to future
from moving towards stillness
from life towards death.
Or, 
so it seems,
    to us,
    with our little particulars in view
    and our social habits a must.
    
The spiderwebs of Time are legion
multitudes of nows of heres;
Uncountable heres and theres 
    unhitched
from any eternal present everywhere.

For a woman at eighty, or a lass of eight,
Time past or present carries different weights.

Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo

Blooms of Spring
flanked by evergreens---
sunshine on stones

the sea
smashed into the shore---
drifting thoughts

the surf wallowed
all in its way─
night and day

cells in my hand
moving the sand─
raindrops washing the sea

rocks of the jetty
slick and cold─
black rockfish gather below

grains of sand
on Graylands' strand─
needles on pines

Olympia, Washington

While on this trip to the Southwest Washington coast I read two books:

I have found the following traveler's reference book to be invaluable while exploring the State of Washington.  It is detailed, specific, thorough, well researched, and highly informative:  
Exploring Washington's Past: A Road Guide to History.  By Ruth Kirk and Carmela Alexander.  Seattle, University of Washington Press, Revised Edition, 1995, detailed index, 543 pages.  

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2, Contemporary Poetry.  Edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair.  W.W.Norton, Third Edition, 2003, indexes, 1210 pages.

Four Days in Grayland

By Michael P. Garofalo