Buoy Alphabet

At the edge of the shipping lane, the buoys keep their vowels, red throats blinking, green tongues turning in the dark. They speak in a slow Morse of swell and hinge, a grammar of tides that leans its weight against the hulls.

I picture the seabed listening, a library of rusted hinges and bottles, the sand sifting through their seams. Each click above is a syllable of warning and welcome, stitched with salt.

Moonlight opens like a knife on the water, carving a path no one can walk. The buoys hum their round notes to the drifting fog, steady as breath against a sleepless shoreline.

Inland, the sleeping town keeps its quiet consonants, while the sea rehearses its wild vowels. If you learn that alphabet, you learn how to return: not by names, but by the sound of light.