for Katie-Kate - sandpiper at dawn

When the sun first stretches her rays over her comforter of clouds,

yawning, blinking around their rumpled edges

as she opens her fiery eyes –

she sees the sandpipers running across the wave-erased sands.

They never wait for her, no –

at the first hint of her waking, there they already are,

skittering, scampering, darting,

playing poker with the waves, a matter-of-fact kind of courage,

a certainty that they will not

be whisked away into a sea far hungrier than they

stands in bold contrast with their understated movements,

their delicate transience,

their never-standing-still-restlessness from tiny beaks to fairy feet.

They bob and flit and change direction

almost before they seem to have any at all.

If they were not so calm within this changing, they would seem frantic,

these little creatures in the dawn, rushing hungrily,

always in search, always in want.

But within the change is constancy.

Within their search is calm.

And as they watch the snatching waves till foam pools at their feet

and sighs away into the ocean, robbed of its smallbird prey

and surrendering instead its own treasures

to their waiting beaks,

the little birds are strange monoliths

of a certainty greater than ocean and sky.

You are small, and the world is not, 

and your desires already are greater than the sum of your surroundings.

When the sun comes up each morning,
your little heart is already running wild on the shores

of an ocean of want and need,

a life that will always play poker with you

and cheat.

Oh, this life robs you blind,

ties your hands behind your back, smudges your cards,

has its own deck in its pocket,

dangles victory under your nose before it rubs your face

in the ashes of your dreams,

transforms pooling ripples to raging riptides.

This life is hungry, almost as hungry as you,

and like a cat, like a toddler, like an ocean,

it plays with its food too. This life will play with you,

set you a table of Toussaud’s wax,

hand you coffee and cream spiked with cayenne,

tuck thorns into your roses,

break in storms around its gifts.

You run, lightfooted, 

on metaphysical, marvelous, mysterious shores.

You stand trembling as early waves sweep in

and the sand on your toes and the wind in your hair and the rays of waking sun

are a kingdom all around you

awaiting your rule; there is so much for you and yet

your belly is still empty.

Breakfast is in the waves

and you are breakfast to the waves, which rumble

louder than your belly;

they have devoured continents.

I hope for you that one day,

as the brightness in you rises and the tides in you sweep in,

you will face the dimness before dawn across the growling oceans

and watch for the table they set for you,

these waves that crash and fade away empty-handed

from your mighty, tiny feet.

I hope for you that your peace will be greater than oceans,

the peace of a sandpiper at dawn.