Today I stood upon the shore
Where Grandad walked in days of yore;
Along its sandy, glossy sheen
Where once, his imprint would have been.

And thereupon I did behold
‘Twas here, when I was two years old;
I dangled from his stalwart hands
In gleeful awe of foaming sands.

So timeless now, this scene appears
It’s altered not these fifty years
Nor hundreds, thousands gone before;
As restless wave greets silent shore.

Still endless rolling surf she brings;
Now to my little son she sings.
I held him in her gentle lee,
The way my Grandad once held me.

As every wavelet’s dying throes
Washed tiny grains between my toes;
Methought perhaps, that in his day,
For every grain, a pebble lay.

Eroded by the tick and tock
Of oscillating tidal clock;
Its pulsing rhythm, all abounding
In softest kiss, or anger pounding.

I pondered what it all may mean;
Our ocean’s mighty time machine.
Where pebbles, hardened, flat or round,
By rolling surf to sand are ground.

From rock to stone to pebbled grain
To sand, and back to rock again.....
As, in our turn, we surely must
Become as ashes........ dust to dust.