The far shore

I wrote this a long time ago, but it has acquired a sad topicality ...

The far shore

Given enough time, all things find their way to the beach.
Every fragment and splinter chipped and chiselled from us
by the prompt, implacable, urgent intrusions of the restless world
is robbed of its sharpness, and is rounded, smoothed, polished
and eventually deposited among the rock-still shingle.

The Universe does not find its demise in shimmering entropy
but in something altogether more strange: an eternal present
where past and future, life and death, memories and dreams
are folded together, and the needle-nosed oystercatcher
sews up the surf as it shuttles across oblivion's brink
stitching shut the day that holds these thoughts together
in me, upon this beach of ceaseless sound,
beneath the hottest sky.

Midday is a hammer blow of light. The threnodious lament
of distant distressed gulls is carried on hot azure wings
across the sun-shattered sapphire of the sky, glimpsed
through half shut eyes in the drowsing driftwood tangle
of my thoughts, while within my grasp a sand fly drones, 
the scope and snare of sense both intimate and cosmic
on this beach where I have escaped the city, fortress of ego,
and now dismiss my insistent hallucinations of selfhood
as I lie among my fellow flotsam.

A boy rejoices in the breaking waves at the water's edge
and my heart both leaps with him and breaks like the waves:
He has found the world, bright and alive, shares its delirium,
and I cannot find it with him, or for him, or share it with him.
The encounter must be his alone, and so my heart is spent
like the spume and passing spindrift. I feel my eventual absence
as keenly as his perfect presence and patrol that other edge
which shares this beach with the margin of his dream,
where, with every wave that breaks, life and death
indefinitely tuck each other away.