Salt Dialects

The tide speaks in a grammar older than any mouth, its consonants dragging shells across the flats at dawn.

I have tried to translate it— the way a wave collapses into foam, how the reef holds its one brown syllable against the pull of everything.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on her windowsill, each piece a word worn smooth by saying it too many times. She called them her library of salt.

Now I stand where the breakers fold their white pages shut and listen for the sentence that contains no lie— just weight, just water, just the honest pressure of arrival.