there was light upon
the sea that made familiar
things mysterious

The Salt Marshes

There was a light upon the sea that made
Familiar things mysterious, which to teach,
With inarticulate, alluring speech,
The living wind with lisping tongue essayed.
O’er sand and weed and spongy moss I strayed
And lifeless, orient shells, musing on each;
While casting nets with ever wider reach
A fisher plied his immemorial trade.
A sea-bird winged the aerial solitude
Searching the deep for his appointed dole,
Where his wide-wandering flocks the ocean feeds;
And with the day’s full orbed strength indued,
At one with all, by all illumed, my soul
Pulsed to the rhythmus of immortal deeds.

By Peter MacArthur and published in his book, Lines (1901).

Peter McArthur (1866-1924) was a Canadian writer. Born in farming country in Middlesex County, Ontario, early in his life he started on a writing career, joining the Toronto Mail as a reporter in 1890. He found he had a knack for writing humour and submitted jokes and satirical essays to periodicals of the time. In 1902 he went to England where he wrote for Punch. After a failed business venture in New York, he returned to his farm home but still submitted articles and essays to magazines.Future books and essays began to feature stories of farm life – he was an advocate of ‘back-to-the-land’ agrarianism. In the 1920s he stopped writing after he joined a rural trust company as an executive. He lived out the rest of his life selling insurance to farmers. (Bio from Fadedpage.com)

I live a five miles from the Atlantic Coast and 6 feet above sea level.

Wikipedia says the average width of the United States is 2,800 miles so my five miles to the coast is 0.1786% of the width of the continent which is pretty much on the cutting edge.

We have the first sunrise.

And the first sunset.

There is a light here upon the sea and the marsh that makes familiar things mysterious.

The living wind with lisping tongue essays.

O’er sand and weed and spongy moss I stray.

it can rise, ebb, froth
frenzy fountains, or it can
sweet-talk entirely

Adapted from the poem, The Poet Compares Human Nature To The Ocean From Which We Came

The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth,
it can lie down like silk breathing
or toss havoc shoreward; it can give

gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth
like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can
sweet-talk entirely. As I can too,

and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

The Poet Compares Human Nature To The Ocean From Which We Came as pubished in A Thousand Mornings
by Mary Oliver, (Penguin: New York, 2012).