Riddle
On these beaches, sun burns
Through the seagrape leaves
In pinpoints like strung lights, which turn
The bushes into Christmas trees,
As if sand were snow, and the shower
Of the spray an ice storm
Where the roiling sea can flower
On the land. Pearls form
Around the outrage of the air,
Winter, summer both the endless,
Sheeting surge of what we dare
To salvage from the world’s wild distress.
Explanation
A riddle is a puzzle, of course, but also, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a large coarse sieve, especially one used for separating ashes from cinders or sand from gravel, or, in this case, form from chaos.
It derives from the Late Old English hriddel, of Germanic origin; from an Indo-European root shared by Latin cribrum ‘sieve,’ cernere ‘separate,’ and Greek krinein ‘decide.’ From the layers of the world, we decide what we are. We sieve structure from chaos, to salvage the parts that matter, the pinpoints of light shining through the confusion of nature.
Humanity’s ability is to is create something beyond itself, something suggested by natural phenomena. If we look hard enough, we can find a point in the enormous wash of the world. That point often is defined as beauty. Beauty is found is specific human observation of immense natural forces. So beauty is a window into meaning, into our reason for being. We want to pass on this beauty, of which we are stewards, into the future.