Pulitzer Prize winning poet Conrad Aiken was born and died in Savannah, Georgia which is just north of Cumberland Island where the last posts’ images were created. Here are some scenes of the shore a little farther away in north Florida accompanied by words of Aiken.
Coquina surf
Then came I to the shoreless shore of silence,
Where never summer was nor shade of tree,
Nor sound of water, nor sweet light of sun,
But only nothing and the shore of nothing,
Above, below, around, and in my heart:
Where day was not, not night, nor space, nor time,
Where no bird sang, save him of memory,
Nor footstep marked upon the marl, to guide
My halting footstep; and I turned for terror,
Seeking in vain the Pole Star of my thought;
[An aside: marl is what is used for roadbeds, fill, paths, in Florida. Behind the house I grew up in was an old marl pit that had been excavated and filled with water, and where I swam and fished. Our driveway was marl, and I’d walk it finding ancient shark teeth and tiny fossils. Some of the marl was possibly coquina rock millions of years before.]
Where it was blown among the shapeless clouds,
And gone as soon as seen, and scarce recalled,
Its image lost and I directionless;
Alone upon the brown sad edge of chaos,
In the wan evening that was evening always;
Then closed my eyes upon the sea of nothing
While memory brought back a sea more bright,
With long, long waves of light, and the swift sun,
And the good trees that bowed upon the wind;
And stood until grown dizzy with that dream;
Seeking in all that joy of things remembered
One image, one the dearest, one most bright,
. . . .
Conrad Aiken, from Preludes for Memnon, 1931
The excerpt is from section XXXIII of that VERY long poem (XX more sections to follow!)