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[Essays] by Michael Theroux 

Breakwater

 

Against the wash of time and tide, great granite walls stretch out, away, cutting in two the incoming flow. Protecting, apace, Man's edifice from collateral damage of the Moon - set as She is to rend asunder. From sand, to sand: the only path.

 

This breakwater stands against the Moon as much as against the pulling surge. Rock on grey rock, Man's construct: surely sound, surely enough to curb the Time, reverse the Tide, to stand and shout Man's dominance across the land, unto the sea.

 

But look! This tiny crustacean completes its Life and joins the flow. Leaving behind a deeper hole where, life on life, its kind have delved into the heart of this grand design, to leave their path, an opening for Time and Tide to slip inside.

 

What cares the Tide, of eons passing as grain by grain the great wall falls? What matters to Time, the span of Man when Progress is inevitable? So too the fields, the very Aire: we matter not, in the scope of things. Ours, only to laugh, to dance, to love.

 

Take the day to watch the Tide and know the Moon orchestrates: we are but sparkles on the crest, come and gone with little trace. Sit by as Siddhartha, see the flow. We choose to join, or to oppose: We Are; perhaps that's all that counts.

 

Coddington’s Nebula

 

A Tick on a Jackal sees its world as a mobile feast, with trees of hair coated in thick red floods, regularly. Other Ticks abide in this hair forest and other worlds collide with fury when the red floods come.

 

The dry plains stretch miles in all directions, with dry grass a carpet for Ticks and Jackals. Sands at the seaward edge whirl and whip in tan clouds blowing Land into the Sea. An Ocean sighs and surges lapping against continents swirling around other oceans.

In its belly rides the Whale and the whale's dinner, Krill, and the krill's feast, so small.

 

With this wet ball, swimming in the warm flow of her star, neighboring planets spin by.

The Sun swims in currents, too, among myriad other stars, adrift in the eddy of the Milky Way.

 

A mere 12 million light years out, IC 2574 is part of the M81 galaxies, churned by stellar winds of hydrogen. Supernova explosions trigger new stars in this lovely island universe, discovered by astronomer Edwin Coddington, in 1898.

 

 

Michael Theroux writes from his home in Northern California. His career has spanned botanist, environmental health specialist, green energy developer and resource recovery web site editor. Entering the public-side of the creative writing field late in life, at 73, Michael is now seeking publication of his cache of art writings which may be found, or will soon be seen, in Down in the Dirt, Ariel Chart, 50WS, CafeLit, Poetry Pacific, Last Leaves, Backwards Trajectory, Small Wonders, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Preservation Foundation / Storyhouse, Cerasus, Acedian Review, the Lothlorien Poetry, City Key, Wild Word, Fixator Press, and elsewhere.




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