by Cecil Morris

We poured our only daughter in the sea
where we’d left my father three years before.
My wife held to me, I held to our son,
and he upended the bag, her cremains,
the grit and gosh of her, there where the sea
seethed against the rocks, the waves in turmoil
of coming, going, coming, rush and suck
and roar, the exuberant turbulence
of child at play in shallow bath. From there
to here, the end of end, our daughter’s sand
released. No more in her place in our home.
Those moments, the wind withheld, our daughter
a lighter gray in dawn-dark Pacific,
the three of us leaning out, a tableau
of goodbye our son’s wife caught on her phone,
the last photograph of the four of us
together where the land and water clash.

Cecil Morris is a retired high school English teacher, sometime
photographer, and casual walker. His first collection of poems, At Work in the Garden of Possibilities, came out from Main Street Rag in 2025. He has poems in The 2River View, Common Ground Review, Rust + Moth, Talking River Review, and elsewhere. He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool Oregon coast and the hot Central Valley of California.