This week’s poem, by Sara Lynn Eastler, considers the life of rock and water. I love how this poem moves into ever more intimate relationship with these elements with each new stanza, before a final reflection on time, as it shapes both granite and ourselves.

Eastler is an assistant poetry editor for Qu Literary Review and a freelance contributor to the Southern Review of Books. Her poetry has been published in Passengers Journal, Anodyne, Voices of Decolonization, and The Bangalore Review.

Postcard from Rockland

Today the Midcoast winds blow fair
having gorged themselves on low pressure
systems and dozed elsewhere.

I walked the Rockland Breakwater,
thirteen hundred meters of locally quarried granite —
sentinels that shelter ships from coastal storm.

What do you say to a slab of rock that spends its life
in conversation with water, battering, conquering
in its relentless pursuit on one side, caressing and kind
on the other? Water has many unexpected faces.

As a child I spoke rock and tree and wind and listened
to coyotes and stars. Now I listen to the exchange
between sea and granite wedge and wonder whether
I will live long enough to notice the subtle sanding
of sharp edges to smooth wear — a feature of water’s
dialog with rock, of time’s brief impression on us all.

– Sara Lynn Eastler

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Postcard from Rockland,” copyright 2023 by Sara Lynn Eastler, appears by permission of the author.