This is a piece I did for Sandy awhile back. Happy Mother's Day.

                              To the Good Mother

There is, after all, nothing very glamorous about a sea wall.
It's just a line of tangled, clunky things
          arced out into the barbarous deep.
There is nothing dazzling to its stance
          as it bows its back against the tide
                    and gentles the wild chop,
          as it absorbs all the tedious and eroding monotony
                              of the world's pulse.

There is nothing to write home about,
          nothing for snapshots or post cards--
In the way it marks the boundary between wild and tame
                              between here and gone--
In the way its staunch shoulders make home.

It knows the dark side of the sea.
Wedged in its cracks and crannies
                    are gold ringed fingerbones
          and the impotent talismans of lost wanderers.
Its leeward side is littered
                    with soggy flotsam and ruin.
And because it knows--
It would barricade its little slice of shore
          to save it from the craze and crush and mean chaos,
                    the gale's ravenous, wild-eyed hysteria.
Because it knows--
It would be an impregnable fortress to its little shore
                    but for the strange music in each crashing wave,
                    but for the seductions of the wild blue yonder,
                    but for the wild magic of wind and sun and spray.
It knows the dark side of the sea--
But it knows its myriad and mysterious beauties.
And so its great embrace is never quite complete.
There is always a passage,
                              marked by a tiny lamp,
          that worries after the brash little boats
                    slipping around its great curved arm
          that squints blinking into the dark for them
                    and strains to find their fragile sails
                              against the great blue-black wilderness.

A passage marked by a tiny bell
          that pierces the thrash of storm for them,
          that calls out to them
                    through the sickening dense silence of fog.

There is nothing very flashy about a sea wall.
It waits half buried--
                    constant--
          patiently braced against the surge and swell
                              marking sanctuary,
                                        making safe harbor.