High Tide (Poem by Heather Smith)

HIGH TIDE

I am the shore that remembers

every wave that ever broke against it,

each grain of sand a small history

of grinding down, of being carried.

At high tide, I disappear—

covered, claimed, possessed entirely

by waters that insist their ancient rights,

that know nothing of boundaries.

See how the ocean takes without asking,

leaves without explaining,

deposits broken shells and darker things

among the stones I've learned to call my own.

Morning finds me rearranged,

my geography rewritten overnight.

What was here yesterday has gone;

what arrives today was never mine to refuse.

The children build their castles at low tide,

trusting the sand to hold their weight,

not knowing I contain the memory

of every structure that has fallen,

of every footprint filled with salt,

of every name written and erased,

of every thing I've held

then given to the tide's insistence.

They call this erosion.

I call it the slow confession of the earth,

the patient way that stone admits

it has no choice but to dissolve.

I am the shore that remembers

being mountain, being rock,

being something that believed

in its own solidity.

Now I am the edge between,

the place where solid things learn breaking,

where the ocean teaches land

that nothing refuses water long.

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Commentary from Heather Smith's notebook, found after her death:

This was always meant to be first. The reader needs to understand from the beginning that this is about inevitability, about forces that shape us without our consent. The shore doesn't choose the tide. It simply endures it, is shaped by it, becomes what the water makes of it. I wanted that feeling of—not exactly powerlessness, but the strange dignity in being worn down by something larger than yourself. The shore remains even as it changes. That's the only victory available sometimes.

Peter [Cross] wanted me to make the metaphor more explicit, but explicit would have ruined it. Let readers see themselves or not see themselves. The shore is the shore. It's also a woman's body. It's also a life. It's also nothing but a beach being eaten by the sea. All of these are true.

The hardest line to write was "deposits broken shells and darker things"—I kept wanting to specify what the darker things were, but specification is a kind of lie. We all know what our darker things are. We don't need to name them to know they're there, half-buried in the sand of us.