Salt Dialect

The tide has its own grammar, a syntax of arrival and retreat that rewrites the shore each hour, leaving clauses of kelp and broken shell for anyone willing to read.

I learned my first words here— not from books but from the way water holds a stone in its mouth and speaks it smooth, syllable by syllable, across centuries.

There is a dialect the salt wind carries over the dunes at dusk, consonants of dry grass bending, vowels stretched long as the last light on wet sand.

My grandmother said the sea remembers every voice it swallows. I press my ear to a tide pool and hear something older than elegy— a hum beneath the hum beneath the waves.