Getting Lost in a Tide Pool

This is one of those poems that stays in my consciousness. I love this getting lost in a tide pool so thoroughly that all else melts away and I am in that tide pool. Sometimes I get this absorbed when swimming in Long Island Sound, particularly in the Fall when the water is clear and the color of chalk board and the schools of bunker fish allow you to swim up close to them, like I am part of the sea as they are.

Lost and Found

LAURA FOLEY

On my sophomore science field trip

to the rocky Maine coast,

I sat captivate by a tidal pool, a little village

of crawling crabs, snails, starfish darting,

a sea anemone appearing to sing.

I stayed so long, I forgot the rising tide,

my teachers, classmates waiting

on the bus. On the exam,

I couldn’t calculate the pitch of waves,

or chemical composition of anything,

but I knew how to lose myself

in the world of tiny shifting things.

Rachel Carson, whose wonderful legacy of love and advocacy for the environment (and who is responsible for Earth Day) also is know for her love of tide pools:

“Tide pools,” she wrote in The Edge of the Sea, “contain mysterious worlds within their depths, where all the beauty of the sea is subtly suggested and portrayed in miniature.”