Beach Grass
Tremulous as elfin lances
Are the thin shafts of the beach grass,
Blades and tufted points that quiver
Eerily to winds of midnight;
Magic strings on lyres enchanted,
Strings that strum a lilting cadence
Played upon by fairy fingers.
Beach grass blades that whirl and struggle
In the clutch of boisterous breezes.
Needle tips that mark strange circles
In the cowering sands beneath them,
Tracings of a fairy stylus,
Runic etchings vague and ghostlike.
Tenuous roots, like bamboo jointed
Delving, burrowing neath the surface
Of the rough hewn sand dunes moulded
By great Nature’s groping fingers;
(Waves and tempests are her fingers)
With their living network binding
Crumbling sands that melt and vanish -
In a woven web of fibre.
Threading with tenacious purpose
Mantles lovely and protective,
Till the battered landscape brightens
Smiles through scars and cruel gashes
Smiles in glossy, rippling beach grass
Undulating in the breezes
Like a field of ripened barley.
Beach grass, desperate, clinging, gripping
Braving wrath of winter tempests,
Scourged by sands that sting like nettles,
Blinding clouds that lash and smother,
Wet with driven spume and frosted,
With the salt and oft half buried,
As the tortured dunes roll landward,
Uncouth monsters, struggling, straining
By the rage of Neptune driven
Stumbling, sprawling, lurching onward.
But the beach grass, fragile, yielding
Like a seine whose mesh entangles,
Binds their heaving bulks together -
In a fibrous web of rootlets;
Gripping fiercely for each foothold
Yielding grudgingly and battling
Till the storm winds howl in fury,
And the baffled ocean smothers
Futile wrath in foam and roaring,
Till the lowly beach grass triumphs;
Holds in magic chains the forces
Of ungovernable chaos.
Beach grass drawing life and nurture
From the sterile sands, a living
Energy from out the desert.
Hardy warrior, silent tamer
Of primeval urgings rampant,
Barrier to the clamorous ocean,
Staunch preserver of the landscape,
Not content with curbing surges
Or restraining restless sand dunes,
How you bless that sterile desert
With your wild and pensive beauty;
Cover o’er its savage harshness
With the mantle of your verdure
Till your patient, steadfast purpose
Glorifies the vanquished sea shore.