"this beach of pebbles"

The poem below received a mention in the sixth edition of the SGP (Sharpening the Green Pencil Contest). It can be considered as a model of bouncing the ordinary life towards the area of allegory.

this beach of pebbles
after the wave
my life rearranged

Gregory PIKO
Yass, AUSTRALIA

I think the focus is on this – “this beach of pebbles”. This very beach I contemplate and recall now. This beach which reveals something unexpected and fascinating to me. This very beach which I propose to you as an object of admiration and meditation. The colloquial language knows how to say, elliptically and concisely, just what there is to say. It does not charge the text with details and descriptive adjectives. That is enough and also very expressive, it calls you over there, to see, to feel and to understand the situation.

The text continues as laconic as before, and, finally, skids more than suggestively, from what the wave really does - it draws the pebbles and leaves them in a new, different order - towards an effect that is entirely implausible – it (re)orders the author’s life (or the reader’s, if he also consents to this revelation). Through this simple substitution of the image of the relentless change of the pebbles’ ordering, moved away by the waves at the same time with human life, what we see is a teaching, and the text acquires the aesthetic value of a haiku.

Revelation, in the human sequence, is actually an assumption under the sway of an image that becomes a vision. There is no disorder, any change under the incessant assault of the waves of life is another unexpected and wondrous order. Thi wave is only the moment when someone has understood and has reconciled with his fate. The pebbles have long known this. And were always saying it, but in vain. The poem tells it to us without insisting, it gives us only food for thought. It draws our attention to the fact that it's already happened to someone.

(Comment by Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)