I wrote these poems at Carkeek beach in Northwest Seattle, near where I live.
From March through October 2025 I found comfort in going to the beach most days, saying my prayers for harmonizing the intense hostility of our politics, playing my tin whistle for a while, finding something interesting to photograph and writing a poem about it.
I was inspired in my poem-a-day practice by my nephew Hugh Marcuson, a wonderful visual artist, who told me he had taken up a challenge to draw a chimpanzee a day for 300 days. Fortunately I misheard him and thought he had said "100 days" - so I decided to see if I could write 100 poems at the beach. The photography emerged very naturally right away, and through the spring, summer and fall I enjoyed witnessing the human, animal, and elemental panoply of life on the beach.
There is a lot of Zen Buddhism, Cancerian melancholy, and absurdity in these poems. I wrote them quickly, in a minute or two, and didn't edit them much. They are very much artifacts of what was happening on that day and in that moment, to me and to the beach.
If you love Carkeek beach, or any beach, I hope these poems will remind you of that love. If you haven't been to the beach in a while, maybe these poems will inspire you to go. If (like the person I love most in the world) you prefer the high mountains, then perhaps your imagination can convert the seaweed stink into crisp mountain air, the seagulls and crows into soaring hawks, and the driftwood into soaring pines.
Back to the poems.
