At the November Hoot, Hugh Harter read this haunting poem, filled with beauty and melancholy, in a structure of subtle rhythm and rhyme:

                      THE BEACH 

                     As far as I see,

                     Expanses of sea,

                     Sea and the sky,

                     And light turning gray.

                     High, high,

                     Why must the light always die?

                     Why does the sun go so far away

                     To join with the dark,

                     To blacken the sky,

                     To blot out the light?

                     Why must it be?

                     Forever the sea and limitless sky?

                     Must we all die?

                     What is there left

                     But the sound of the waves

                     And the solitude?

                                                       – Hugh A. Harter

 What eternal questions the images of “limitless sky” and “expanses of sea” evoke in this moving poem: questions of light and dark, pleasure and pain, life and death – the death of others as well as our own mortality, and the solitude after another’s death. The questions and the voice seem like those of a young child somehow imbued with the wisdom and experience of age: “Why must the light always die?” …“Why must it be?”

– Harvey Shepard   
(hshepard@gmail.com)

 

“The Beach” copyright 2007 by Hugh A. Harter. Hugh Harter and his wife Fran moved to Portsmouth in 2003 after years of living and working in New York City and other foreign and American cities. He has been a professor of Spanish and French at several major universities, as well as authoring, co-authoring and translating books on the literature and cultures of France, Spain, and Latin America.