Young Sea Lion Dying on the Beach
By Larry Greco Harris, Coastal Dunes Branch
The young sea lion lies way up on the beach.
She is far from living water, rocking slightly on the sand
and surrounded by last night’s tracks of coyotes and puma
who came down after dusk to circle what washed ashore
and take what was easy enough to harvest
for themselves and kits and cubs.
Which tells me that she wasn’t as easy last night as she is today.
Westerly breezes still deliver ocean messages to her twisting nose
and have dried her coat from an oily black to this terry cloth tan
whose bristles pick up bits of shell and sand
only to drop them away again with the rock & sway of her pain.
Despite her soft appearance,
this is no pleasurable lounge on a summer beach;
this is no playful respite from chasing fish;
this is no yawning stretch in the hammock of seal satiation.
For her, today–and especially tonight–
there is no hope for building anything like that
on this shifting sand.
That is, unless Hope means this:
that the shivering of her lifted fin to the sky
and the pressing of her winced eyes to the sand
and the seizure of her tight grin stretched taut in my helpless presence
are all just the expected pops and cracks
of the same simple blossoming we will all display
the day we squeeze ourselves through the constricting turtle neck
stitched so painfully into the cloth of the new life.
“Young Sea Lion Dying on the Beach”
appears in Coastal Dunes Branch’s
new anthology Shifting Sands.