Salt Dialect

The tide arrives with its old alphabet, pressing consonants into the sand, each wave a sentence the shore has almost learned to answer.

Driftwood holds the grammar of storms — split oak, cedar stripped to nerve, their rings still counting years in a country that sank beneath the kelp.

I stood where the breakwater crumbles and tasted the word for distance. It was sharp, mineral, the way a bell sounds when struck underwater.

Fishermen mend nets at dusk, their hands fluent in a syntax no dictionary keeps — knot, release, knot, release, a phrase repeated until it holds.

Somewhere past the harbour light the ocean is composing its next long utterance, and the coast leans in, illiterate, listening.