Often, when we least expect it, the pain and the preoccupation come back, and back — sometimes like the rolling crash of an ocean wave, sometimes like the slow ooze after a piece of driftwood is lifted and water and sand rise to claim their own once more. — Martha W. Hickman, Healing After Loss

How is it that the Internet is forever in some ways, and forgotten in the ways that matter the most.

I used the privilege of my first hand-coded website before the turn of the millennium to render some poetry I imagined I wanted to keep forever, and to create a few lines of my own. That one I wrote, Last Night on Ocean Beach, is now no longer accessible but for the Internet Archives, but reading the above line in the forward by Martha W. Hickman, it surges back again.

The Internet can’t keep our people, but I can try.

Last Night on Ocean Beach
After wandering way back out
past surprised starfish exposed
clinging to slippery green undersides of rocks
and stripped bare to the rising sensations
now remembering their dreams of foam-dashed rocks
succumbed to sleep,
high storm at sea
once again prepares its home
and rises

Driftwood on the Northern California Coast, August 2025