Listen
and you will hear the sea
Noel King
Her sideboard held
two proud shells,
my grandfather’s bounty
from the only days apart
in their fifty-seven years,
the edges clipped,
but sounds intact.
Her eyes beamed care
into my hands
any time I picked them up
and I did at will;
one to each ear,
imagining the beach I know
that she knows, the beach that,
at eighty-nine,
she could no longer take me to.
I sprayed on furniture polish
one Christmas clean - she rebuked gently,
showing how, wiping the grooves with a flannel.
If I could pick them up today,
I would hear as vivid,
but I
don’t need to.