migrant, writer, work in progress
Look seaward west where
Sun’s gone down pale mauve striped pink
Cloud dimming shadows
*
That photographer
With his spotlight on the beach
Where people are shades
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The silver ocean’s
Rippled blue reflecting waves
Whishing softly by
*
Offshore windmills stand
Like far off crucifixes
Harvesting the sky
*
Spirits whisper power
To earth and air and water
Resurrecting time.
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Photos of Scheveningen Beach, The Hague, by Freddie Oomkens
two crows watch the beach
until the sea spits out a fish
flying and then dying on the sand
*
two crows pick this fish
to pieces, scoff down their feast,
fly on back inland
*
—the crows are lucky
all the gulls were gone—they’d have
had to fight for food:
*
they’d have lost it,
weren’t it only witnessed by
a passing poet.
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Omm
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Photo by F. Oomkens
when we want to live
a life more lit and touched with
fire we need the beach
*
where sea throws us waves,
surf singed with feels we can’t share
like words lost in storm
*
light snow drifts on dunes
while wind blows cold and dry, we
walk down to the shore—
*
foam flies from the waves
like smoke, rolls on soft wet sand,
the dog sniffs, bites it;
*
sunlight’s lying on the beach–
wet, shining now the ash-curled waves sink
reflecting sky:
*
clouds of flame and ash
float through blue, hidden heaven
soaking into earth
*
sky, flames, snow and wind, waves, foam and sand,
they and all of it are never still not ever but they move us
through us as we walk, wish, stand–
*
what I see, I write,
and with my words I try to
catch the snow and light
*
**
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Photos by F. Oomkens
I
All my life I’ve loved
beaches and the beauty of
being on the edge
*
Where senses merge like
sex in sand and sky in eyes
we are everywhere
*
Feeling a moment
like lifetimes of loving light
from intense shadows
*
While feelings blur like
sea in sand and sky in air
we’re here everywhere.
II
All my life I’ve loved
beaches and their hot bodies
heating everyone
*
(Save folks or times with
lack of lust for life in sex through
mood or age or choice)
*
All my life I’ve loved
soft warm curves that turn things hard
tangling everything
*
All my life I’ve loved
those days when outlines grow so vague
you shape in the flow
*
Like waves washing worlds
that wishes made whole, oceans
smooth and connect us
*
All our lives loving
beaches and bodies and love
make us all hotter
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And all our lives’ love
lifts us from life’s heaviness:
makes our lives lighter.
III
All my life I’ve loved
light, I’ve left darkness behind
when stuff got murky
*
At dawn if things got
sweaty I might stay on till
stuff got cool again –
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– I get dark sometimes
too, we all do, but try to
leave darkness at dawn
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Omm
September 2020
the imagination required to see
how life grows through a series of moments
*
(at once selfcontained, static and timeless
yet flying yes swarming into infinity)
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like flocks of geese breaking from an amber
sunset into invisibility
*
like summer nights fading in september
flown into those endless twilights of eternity
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where sensation is becoming to where
we run blindly into fresh horizons
fading as each sunrise into darkness
this warm fleeting intimacy we share
created from those moments is the essence
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freddie omm
big sur
september 2019
Freddie in Ventura
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those amber sunsets
never set but hung in mind
resplendent always
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many years before
this beach and all that’s on it
were now, were mine
*
time was not what it
now is nor is becoming
each moment stayed whole
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the waves held me fast
while the wind blew permanence
over solid sand
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gulls sat in the sky
as if transfixed or painted
by a maker’s hand
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a kid on a beach
– in the timeless space of life –
that kid’s always now
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freddie omm
ventura, september 2019
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The first of my haiku chains about Ventura beach was published here in December 2014: on ventura beach. I wrote this new one and took the photo while revisiting the beach last week.
all our holy ghosts
live in us, and we in them –
love’s eternal haunting:
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blithe spirits spook us
from deserted dunes – singing
sands, rustled by winds –
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heartbeat-storms roil round
the beach, rouse stomping wildness,
clamour in our veins:
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we are the children
– and parents – of the past
in love’s family
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whose children succeed
give birth to generations
for eternity
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mother father child
live and grow and give their love
timeless trinity
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all our holy ghosts
live in us as we in them
we are love eternal
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Omm
Spring 2018
from boardwalks buried
in the bed of that steep dune
you step on the beach –
*
sandscapes shift, air-borne,
you’re a visitor here, as
timelessly moving
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as sea waves wash off
infinite fictions of earth –
mere specks on a spot in space.
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Omm
october 2017
now, then, soon – shoredays,
wave-lapped hours, wind-spun and warm
like summer kisses
*
blown in midwinter
distillated on our lips
blissed out, oh! timeless
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yoredays – flown, but here
with you forever, come spring
and the buds and birds –
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skies drunk on light, blue
till blacked-out, then flopping blank
on a spinning globe
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summerled like myth,
tripping out on dewy toes –
yoredays, yours, mine, theirs,
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the only sure thing
left is love in all our lives,
strewn along the dunes
*
days of sun, shoredays –
all transilluminated,
hewn in memory
