(PROSE POEM)

TWENTY-FOUR TOWERS ON THE BEACH

​KATHARYN MACHAN

​I was earliest, I thought, light still hidden behind pale dunes held by hard grass and wind pushing wide-sky clouds across the rippled pearl of moon. But they were there, mother and child, night-green flow around their knees gentle where their focused hands reached and scooped and heaped and shaped the whitest sand I’d ever walked in all my years of walking. Somehow I knew not to move too close at first, at least, until she saw me, paused, considered, judged, then smiled and bent her head to her son again. His tiny fingers were intent and skilled as he built a world he might have dreamed he could make come true at dawn. Her hair was smooth and tight and taut–so short it hardly seemed hair at all–and her shoulders curved like a warm shell above where foam rushed by. Just at the edge of waves they worked, just where warm water kept them wet....I moved off as the sun was rising, found a crown of curling crimson weed, turned to offer it to the sea-eyed boy: nothing now but his morning castle and two manatees far, far away.

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​Katharyn Howd Machan, author of 38 collections of poetry (most recently What the Piper Promised, winner of the 2018 New Alexandria Press chapbook competition), has lived in Ithaca, New York since 1975 and, now as a full professor, has taught Writing at Ithaca College since 1977. After many years of coordinating the Ithaca Community Poets and directing the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops, Inc., she was selected to be Tompkins County’s first poet laureate. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, and she has edited three thematic anthologies, most recently one honoring Adrienne Rich.