Poetry

A Little Poem about the Sea

With text from 1001 Questions Answered about the Seashore

The salts of the sea have come from the earth’s crust, dissolved by water. Where does the water go when the tide is out? The water does not go anywhere. The sea ebbs and flows on the shore up or down, like the water in a bathtub when you get in or out, except here it is the moon.

I wrote this poem with text I’d cut and pasted from a book called 1001 Questions Answered about the Seashore, written by N.J. Berrill and originally published in 1957.

I pasted the text onto watercolor paper that I’d torn to fit the size of the little poem. Then I added a touch of blue ink to the torn edges.

Not long after I’d finished the poem, my brother told me about a new local project created by friends of his: the Free Little Art Gallery (Edmonds). I decide to share the poem with the mini-gallery.

Free Little Art Galleries work like Little Free Libraries, except with small works of art. People can leave art to take, and people can take art that they like.

As it turns out, the owners of the little gallery posted a picture of my poem on Instagram after it was added to the gallery, and a neighbor hurried over to pick up the poem. The neighbor (who isn’t someone I knew before this) sent me a message on Instagram to tell me how much she liked the little poem and that she’d hoped she could get it after seeing the photo of it online.

It made me feel happy to hear this from her, and it’s nice to think of someone enjoying my work like that.

Have you ever shared any of your own work in a Little Free Art Gallery or Little Free Library?

For more about my work with found text, please see the poem and discussion in the story below.