There’s a secret beach I travel to along the shores of Lake Ontario in the course of my frequent walks. It is a somewhat secluded spot tucked away in the trees at the end of long winding paths. I call it “my beach” although it is not mine. It is a destination that I share, at times with a few other souls, adults, children but mostly with nature alone.  It’s secluded, especially in the fall and winter. A place of contemplation and beauty, here the water is often beautifully luminous, translucent, although never static. It’s colour, clarity, form change and often dramatically. The horizon and sky seem endless here. The crescent shaped beach of fine sand, multi-coloured pebbles, and scattered trees, is mostly full of flat slabs rocks of recycled brick, asphalt, worn down by nature to resemble their original states before they were processed or touched  by human hands. Blanched deadwood litters the shore like snakes, and lying nudes. The beach becomes transformed by wind, water, and light by the season, by the hour, most strikingly at 4pm and just before sunset. These are the times when light hits the rock, water, and clouds at certain angles casting long shadows that transform it into another world.

Beach on Infinity

And we walked along

the guarded path

where the pygmy loves

could not tread,

to the sands of my sacred beach

on a sea of infinity,

to that place in the sand

where the setting sun

froze and

stood still as a pearl.

And our dreams crystallized

into cast

grains of salt

all around us.

There with our feet

grounded In the sand

of a cosmos

of a million realities,

we became

a knife in a bleeding heart.

Our tears became bubbles

that rose upwards

and burst into the air

that was thick

with the moment

of a golden light,

and with a fleeting

despair,

quickly melting

into a night of stars.

From “Free Verse in Useless Times” by PWChaltas