Scrappy bushes and the reeds called sea oats
cling to the dunes that line the road.
The dunes, rising and falling, cling to the shore
we glimpse in flashes through troughs of sand.
Waves cresting white cling to the horizon
where clouds layer like stacks of gray plates.
Salt clings to wind that runs up the dunes
where two laughing gulls paste their silhouettes
against the slate clouds, before waves opening
like the pages of a book, among the wind’s
diacritical marks parsing the run-on sentence
of the dunes. The music of the dunes,
like a logbook fading to illegibility
or a ledger slipping out of its accounts,
shifts daily to echo the frangible shore,
whose sea oats, through all evidence
of storms, erosion, tides, all that is periodic
and impermanent, just barely cling.
This poem first appeared in Gargoyle Online (2023).
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Kim Roberts will release two new books in 2025: Q&A for the End of the World, a collaboration with Michael Gushue (WordTech Editions), her seventh book of poems; and Buried Stories: Walking Tours of Washington, DC-Area Cemeteries (Rivanna Books), her second guidebook. She has edited two anthologies of poems by Washington, DC authors, and co-curates DC Pride Poem-a-Day each June. http://www.kimroberts.org
