Strength

Little girl I am not here to
Play your frivolous games or
Indulge your fanciful flings.
I do not build facades
Like your boyish fellows
In a factitious feint
To contain your wild wonder,
Your wind, your currents, your waves.
Their faux walls,
Mere piles of brick and stone,
You destroy piece-by-piece,
In chunks or all at once
At your leisure
To be lost,
Dragged into your
Murky, briney depths.

I am an island.
A barrier of sand in the midst of your
Restless expanse.
The pieces of me you carry away today
Gleam smooth and warm on my shore
Returned on tomorrow's morn,
Neither tattered, tattooed, torn nor worn.
Your crashing surf,
Slides off me as receding waves,
Each cycle leaving me
Minutely elevated, enriched.
Your storms, your hurricanes, your typhoons,
Brandish, fling your
Flotsam and jetsam,
Giving forth the wreckage
You thought sunken.
They cannot disquiet my infrangible foundation,
Merely sticking in me
Your marks, your tokens, your grails,
Drying and musking in the sun
Until their dark putrid damp
Becomes a bleached white bouquet
To be carried off by the birds,
Used as asylum for virgin life or
Patiently slip beneath
My level, even calm.
Through time and your
Trivially testing tectonic twitches,
You will become an inland sea
Surrounded,
Harbored by me.