Coastal Bloom

By John Muro

PROMPT—Never will I forget ...

Summer’s rejoicing as sunlight ripples across

the water in elusive intervals of pewter and

half-hidden blue while, closer in, the waves

swell, forming small hills that flash oyster-

white just before their soft implosion only

to straightway be reborn and push onwards

towards shore depositing their musty odors,

primal grist and a dense bloom of translucent

orbs across the sand like some plum-blue

plague of tumors or calamity of tiny zeppelins

with their long mooring cables still attached

and so what once belonged to the sea has

now been given up to land, and I’m trying

to reconcile death’s gothic garden and its

hideous miseries with its unbearable beauty

and the many times we must indulge

despair just to go on living while minding

the interludes between the exploding waves;

the coaxing shudder and tremble of back-

wash; and the abundant emptiness that

comes between, most resembling a solemn

moment of mending or a morning prayer.

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John Muro has authored three books of poems— In the Lilac Hour (2020), Pastoral Suite (2022) and, most recently, A Bountiful Silence (2025). He is a four-time Pushcart nominee, a two-time Best of the Net nominee, and a Grantchester Award recipient. John's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Acumen, Cool Beans Lit, Grey Sparrow, Sky Island, the Valparaiso Review, and elsewhere. He writes from Glastonbury, CT.