Prose & Comments: This Island
BY NAT LIPSTADT
On an island, nature sculpts boundaries,
an artisan, offering up shorelines
that demand touch, exploration;
a Bathsheba seductress, teasing with
promises of interlocking curves,
and behind every bend lies,
a perhaps…
Have you ever countered the irresistible beach force,
whose only commandment, carved in white sand is,
circumnavigate me!
Explore the irregular cuts upon
the rounded edges of an island
that thrusts forests and swamps,
into the body of those waters
who dare try to shape/erode it
to their desires.
This island fights time and tide with
fists of sea grasses and oak forests.
Inward and windward,
chart this isle’s odd, misshapen contours,
better thus, to know thine own
misshapen irregularities.
Silvered shelled paths
upon the beach show you only
where you began, but not
a beginning, and to whence,
return is inevitable.
Ask for the shelter of this island mass:
see where careless sailboats
wake unanchored to the
face slaps of ocean-going fishing boats,
see them come running for
harbor, hearth n’ home,
a welcome repeated 400 years on.
When sad and mournful over the passing
of its youths in faraway lands,
in the manner of sea folk,
the island nominates their souls upon
its byways and boats.
Thus, they are forever ferried home
to safe harbors, each voyage,
a perpetual welcome home for Joe,
never to be forgot.
This colonial refuge,
its own peculiar yellow star marked,
inhabited by impatient, independent folk
declaring themselves by their own
congress and oath,
free and independent in 1775.
a year premature, or perhaps,
just, a year ahead of the rest.
Speech, a peculiar accented tongue,
a Grecian Formula,
part New England, part Portuguese,
said dialect recognized officially by
the imprimatur of the cash dispensers
of Mr. J. P. Morgan.
I too am marked, as recent arrival,
not even a pseudo-citizen,
an unqualified summer boy,
no better than Jacob’s tribe
where after 240 years in Egypt,
the Israelites were still called outsiders.
This isle has its own laws
and ten years is bare sufficient
to be titled newcomer.
Maybe, and this is generous,
your yellow North Ferry ticket
has the box, occasional visitor,
punched, occasionally.
Beachcomber upon the preserved paths
that decorate its roughened lace of forests,
find myself disrobed and revealed
before a tribunal of wind, water and honest sun,
a triumvirate of the island’s judges,
who countenance no lies,
permit no disturbance to blot the peace,
unless it’s a swirl of nature.
A mug of disheveled thoughts
brews, drips, percolates
as I perambulate amidst shells and debris,
unable to avoid the sea’s and my own detritus,
recall the Desiderata:
“Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence,”
Upon this island, learn resolute and teach thyself
harmony to accept the shape of your own boundaries,
and like this isle, both give shelter and be sheltered.
Nat Lipstadt of New York City has been a regular summer visitor to Shelter Island for three years.
