We Read His Poems Every Year on the Beach
The tide gets the last line; that was always the deal.
My brother planned his own remembrance the way other people plan weddings, with a venue, a run sheet, and a strict rule about readings. "Don't do the poems at the funeral," Danny told me in the hospice, two weeks before the end, while a nurse changed the bag on his IV like it was nothing, like the world was not folding up its tent. "Funerals are terrible venues. Bad acoustics. Everyone stares at their shoes. Do them at the beach."
Then he handed me a wooden box, the old cigar box that used to hold his fishing lures, and inside were fifteen envelopes, numbered, sealed, my name on the lid in his terrible left-slanting handwriting.
"One a year," he said. "First Saturday of June, our beach, dusk. Read it out loud, all of you. Then whoever reads writes the last line in the sand below the tideline and you all shut up and watch until the water takes it." He grinned at me with the three-quarters of his old face the illness had left him. "The tide gets the last line. That's the deal. Non-negotiable."
I said what you say. I said, Danny, this is morbid... you're going to beat this. He looked at me the way he used to look at me when I claimed I hadn't eaten his chips.
He was thirty-one. He was a plumber.
Nobody in our family knew he wrote poems at all until the box.
The first June, eight of us stood on the beach at Carreg Bay in horizontal Welsh rain, and my mother could not do it, so I opened envelope number one with hands that would not behave. The poem was about the two of us jumping off the harbour wall as kids, and the sound my mother made halfway through is not one I will write down. The last line was: the sea keeps every promise it never makes. I carved it into the wet sand with a lollipop stick from my niece, and we stood in a row like fools, coats snapping, and watched the tide come and read it and swallow it.
And here is the thing nobody warns you about grief rituals: they work.
Not like medicine. Like plumbing, Danny would have said. They give the flood somewhere to go.
We have done it every year since. Year three my father, who had not said Danny's name aloud since the hospital, read the envelope in a voice like gravel getting up from a chair, and afterwards he stood at the tideline for twenty minutes on his own, trousers soaked to the knee, and came back different. Lighter around the mouth. Year five I was stuck in Berlin for work and I took the photocopy my sister sent me to a freezing Baltic beach at the exact hour, and read my brother's poem alone to some scandalized German dog walkers, and wrote the last line in that foreign sand, and the tide there took it just the same. Turns out the sea is the sea everywhere. Danny probably knew that too.
Year seven my niece Efa read for the first time. She was born four months after he died. She pronounced "heron" as "heroin" and the whole family laughed until we cried... and then just cried, and it was somehow the best year of all. She is the only one of us who knows him purely as a voice that comes out of an envelope one evening a year, and she loves him with a completeness the rest of us, with all our memories, cannot match.
We do not read his poems to bring him back. We read them so the sea has to learn his name one evening a year.
The poems themselves got better as the numbers climbed, or maybe we did, as readers. Some were funny. Number nine was entirely about our mother's cooking and contained the phrase "gravy with a grudge" and she pretended to be furious and has quoted it at every Sunday dinner since. Some were hard. Number eleven was about the hospice at 4 a.m. and the sound the heating made, and how he had stopped being afraid on a Tuesday... just like that, the way weather changes. I have read a lot of poetry since, chasing that feeling. I found some of it in the work of writers nobody had heard yet, ordinary people with day jobs and one box of astonishment in them, plumbers of other towns. Danny would have liked that company better than any anthology.
This June was year fifteen.
The last envelope.
We all knew... and nobody said it. My mother made three kinds of sandwiches for a fifteen-minute ceremony. My father polished his shoes to stand on a beach. Twelve of us now, two babies who never met him strapped to chests, the dusk doing that thing over the water where the grey goes briefly gold as a favour.
I opened envelope fifteen.
Inside there was no poem.
There was one line, in the terrible handwriting: Now it's your turn. One each. Same deal. And underneath, smaller, the sentence that took my legs out: You've had fifteen years of lessons.
He knew.
He sat in that hospice bed doing the arithmetic of our grief, and he decided that fifteen years was long enough to teach a family of electricians and dinner ladies and one accountant that poetry was not a thing other people did. That it was just the truth, dressed for the water.
So we stood on the beach and did the impossible. My father went first, which shocked everyone including my father. He had written four lines on the back of a receipt about teaching Danny to cast off the harbour wall, and the last one was: I let go of the rod, boy, never of you. He wrote it in the sand himself, bent over like a question mark, and would not let anyone help him up until the tide had been paid.
Efa, fifteen now, exactly as old as the ritual, wrote hers about a man she has never met being the reason she is not afraid of deep water. Mine was short. I have spent a year on it since anyway, the way you do, and this spring I finally entered a version of it into a monthly poetry contest, because Danny left instructions about hiding your poems in boxes and I intend to disobey them on his behalf. Most of what I write now circles family, and the strange arithmetic of it: how the dead can keep teaching, how a man can leave you fifteen years of homework and call it a gift.
The box is not empty, by the way. It holds our poems now, one a year, numbered in twelve different handwritings. Efa has already claimed custodianship in writing, because she is her uncle's niece down to the bone.
At dusk this year the tide came up the sand slow and certain, the way it always does, an old creditor who knows you're good for it. It took my father's line first.
The sea keeps every promise it never makes. Danny wrote that when he was dying... and I still do not fully know what it means.
But I have watched the water honour it fifteen times, and that is closer to knowing than anything else I own.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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