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The Day the Tide Stopped
Amelia Gorman


it didn’t. It kept going, a new kind of stopping.
Is there a verb for when a pendulum
Doesn’t swing back? One that means both
to stop a process & to continue on forever?
 
The closure that is a beginning,
the ending that is an opening.
 
The day the tide stopped the waves
painted new horizons on the dawn
and new ones again after that and
dry cracks opened on a circle’s side.
 
Life started itching, red under its skin,
with words that suggest something
​that fights their own selves,

pinion feathers pinioned.
 
The end of the tide is a study of life
in grief. It is the loss of a hundred homes
in one rock. They never existed, not
temporal and not spatial.
 
Working the muscles of denial,
the ocean ever-cleaving.

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