This short tale is not of the West where the day ends, 
nor of the parched land and the winds that move and shift the dunes and dips of its sun dried sands. 
No, this is a tale of the East, where the sun first comes up and the day starts. 
It is a tale of the sea that I know. 

It is told by the gull in his quest for a meal of fish, 
by the small birds that float from crest to lull of the waves. 
It tells of salt air, the smell of tar, of the land that rests at the edge of the sea, 
of the mist that covers all in a mood of queer and strange shapes and sounds, 
of the deep drone of the horn as it tells of the fog, 
the fog that slips in from the sea on heavy air and soft east wind. 

This is the land of the man who sells his fish for trade; 
the beach spanned with a maze of his nets, 
stretched from pole to pole in the sun to dry and air the salt from the twine. 
This is the land where the surf pounds,
where each wave moves in where the last had been, 
to roll up in a crest, to reach the top, then fall in a slide and crash
to the beach in a flow of life. 

All these things, the blue and green life, and the land at its edge, are the sea that I know. 
The sea that tells its own tale.

© 2005 E. S. von Gehren All Rights Reserved

[This piece was written using one-syllable words to demonstrate the power of what are usually Anglo-Saxon words. It is the polysyllabic ‘foreign’ words that have been incorporated into the English language that provide more of the flower and finesse, though lacking some of the ‘punch’ we see here.]