When Sea Kisses Shore
Announcing the release of my 10th book of poetry, When Sea Kisses Shore!
Love is the most sublime mystery in human life. Throughout the ages, it has been celebrated by poets and playwrights, analyzed by scientists and philosophers, and sought after by people in all walks of life. It can knock us on our butts, stop us in our tracks, sweep us off our feet, lift us to the stars, and push us over the edge.
When Sea Kisses Shore explores the power of love to touch and transform us, which sometimes occurs in a single tidal wave, a tsunami that slams onto the bank, tearing down our habitat and sweeping most everything we once held precious into the sea. But more often it is the culmination of wave after wave mostly spilling gently on the shore mixed with surges and plunges and inshore waves that drain the beach as a backwash, wearing down our rough edges, smoothing our rocky surfaces, and shaping our shore in ways we cannot predict.
Nothing belongs more to each other
than the sea and the shore.
Excerpt from The Duet
This may be the most powerful transformation love works over us: restoring us to the mystery of life and reminding us of our place in the family of things. If you have ever felt yourself brimming with desire for someone, for some place, or for some thing; or if you have ever dared give your heart to another or to life, this collection of love poems is for you. If you have ever known loss and loneliness, felt defeated by the heartbreak of desire, and longed to be made whole again, this book is for you. If you have ever been at a loss for words to share your love, this book will give voice to what lives in your heart!
“Nick LeForce writes with his blood. His passionate, authentic search for the Real courses through every line and leaves its mark in the heart of the reader. His poetry illumines “the newness of things already known,” and never more so than when he speaks of love - the love of God, the love of another, the love that marries heaven and earth. Read his work and you will see the world with fresh eyes.”
Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of love,
was said to be born of the sea
and rose out of the waves
riding a scallop shell.
We all have times when we wish for a new life, to be awakened into a new world. One of the key aspects of all spiritual traditions is that we mostly live our lives sleepwalking and that our primary spiritual task is to awaken to our true nature, which, according to many spiritual teachers, is love.
The Shore
I am pulled from the sea,
lifted on Aphrodite’s shell,
salt water forced from my lungs
by your CPR, your kiss awakening
my heart, pumping this life into being.
Call it a birth, born into an exact copy
of the old world, everything the same
except me:
I am just now beginning to remember
who I am, why I walked into that
desperate ocean and what I hoped
to find there.
Now awakened in this body, looking
into your eyes, I can honestly say:
“It’s alright if the stars fall into our laps,
it’s alright if the sea sweeps
all our sand dollars away,
it’s alright if it all ends right here,”
because loss is just another doorway
into longing for this life
“Nick LeForce weaves words in ways that move me… in the same way as Tolkien, Auden, Spender, Wordsworth, Keats, LeGuin, Richard Bach and Shakespeare and many others where I have found inspiration and hope from sometimes desperate situations….I am profoundly in your debt for your gift of poetry.”
and I will walk again into that ocean,
the salt water will again fill my lungs,
drowning me again in this longing
to be lifted, to be pulled
onto the shore of a new life
and awakened by your kiss...