Writing Exercises: The Tide in Sain-Malo

A venit și momentul în care acest blog se transformă în blog bilingv. Am hotărât să împărtășesc cu voi unele din scrierile mele, și multe din ele vor fi în limba engleză. Unele dintre ele au fost scrise ca temă pentru cursurile de scriere creativă, altele au fost scrise după. Vor fi poezii, povești, eseuri. Articolele obișnuite vor fi în continuare în limba română. Primul exercițiu este o poezie, ca să începem așa, mai romantic.

This is how my blog becomes a bilingual one. I’ve decided to start sharing some of my writing exercises with you, and they will be mostly written in English. Some of them were written during my creative writing workshops, at the Writers Studio, some after. There will be poems, stories, essays. However, I chose a poem to be the first one I share, to start in a more romantic way.

When I wrote this poem, I had to choose a natural phenomenon as an inspiration, and my choice was the tide, the one in Saint-Malo, France — said to be the highest tide in Europe. To better understand what I’m talking about, please watch this wonderful video:

 

The Tide in Saint-Malo

They call it the highest tide in Europe
the restlessness of the sea at Saint-Malo.
Water running away and coming back every evening
returning quickly, frenzied, in big waves
covering the beach in its entirety
washing off every trace of sand

the way your presence dilutes the sand
paper of my thoughts. In my heart
there’s a sea, full of salt and shells,
green algae and jellyfish. It is all blurry
swirling in a chaos, moving with the tide wave.
The shores, drying under the sun, dreaming of water

Angry, unsettled but determined water
dancing a crazy dance day after day.
Rushing towards the shores when the dark surrounds it
this entity can’t decide what it wants.
The beach is not enough, the sea longs to touch
the stone that was made by humans, not by gods.

They blame it on the sun and the moon
It’s an ancient story, we’ve been like this since
the begining of time, don’t you remember? my heart says.
Magnets inside our minds, our bodies,
pulling and pushing, depending on the moon’s mood,
never-ending waves of feelings.

Tormented shells that don’t know how to control their feelings
are rising from the deep in a repeated pattern.
At least you can see there’s an order in all this
painful repetition. High and low, high and low,
the sea trembles, the currents make it shiver
when it’s rushing to cover what was left exposed

during the day. Sometimes you want to expose
all the painful sand lines, I know,
leaving their rough beauty shine in the daylight
but there are shells that get left behind with it,
and stones, and algae, and jellyfish. That’s why
the sea will always come back, rushing. To cover

the leftovers that make her tremble. The moon
and the sun will call it. The magnets will lure it and the sand
will always wait for the salty water to come back and flood it.