He walked the beach. Tired, dejected, disillusioned. The waves came crashing down, wetting him with every spray. They echoed his inner mood as he plodded on. Plodding to nowhere; just plodding. Interiorly, he felt his world had crashed. The critics panned his latest collection of poems. “Trite,” one lamented. “Hardly the brilliance of his earlier poems,” another judged. “Perhaps, he’s got nothing more to say,” an influential literary journal opined. “Why write poetry?” he grieved. Then, he saw it. Amidst the pebbles and shells, an almost pristine cone shell. He ran towards it like he used to as a kid playing “find the cone” with his Dad on the beach. Like the little boy he once was, he picked it up, held it to his ear and closed his eyes. And he listened. Listened to the sound of the ocean of infinity. Listened to its roar opening up to the silent truth that his poems, his words were never his but God’s creation. Words to render for another in cadence, metaphor and rhyme something of the divine. He looked out to the sea: a few first lines of a poem were cresting in the whites of the blue, blue waves reaching out to him.
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