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# Long Island sound – three poems
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article-1969jsp/
- Published: 2004-06-16T23:06:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-17T11:53:02.000Z
- Author: Eva Salzman
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 19:17, #ImagesUploaded

**Pilgrim**

The beach was a shrine of steel in summer.  
Its muscular heat stunned me face-down in prayer,

devotions buried in the scallop-shelled sand.  
I was the shocked one, unable to faint

and impress the oak-smoked boys, the lavendar girls  
who just stepped over me with the meanest care.

How I kissed the shore of my shame and wishing!  
And eternity rushed to meet them in a wave.

![pilgrim](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3f/80/3f804bea-4b2d-4ddf-9ff0-6ec7d0afa5fa/content/images/2026/04/pilgrim_565_xrX5MYk-1776425903042.jpg)

pilgrim

Brasil Itacare de Bahia Gilles Favier, 2000

**Conch**

My grandmother doesn’t hear me call; a white mist licks  
her skull. She shuffles out to the jungle-yard  
to pin a single greying cloth to the drying rack’s  
sun-dial spines, the dulling weather-vane  
where the fading laundry’s years have swung and aired.

The piece of washing turns its only two pages  
back and forth, re-read by the wind, water veins  
mapping the ground, while shadows throw vaguer  
and vaguer epitaphs across the sheets snapping in the breeze.  
The woman goes inside, and her door shuts again  
into the memory I’ll always hold of its splintered frieze.

But my real grandmother’s sealed thousands of miles away  
in her red-brick house deafened with treasure – bone-and-tulle  
dancing skirts, dried quills, the family of bells  
lined up in ever-decreasing size, their peals subsiding  
to white noise, her shell collection emptying the sea,  
vowels bleached on another shore; and from the countless shelves  
she’s taken her umpteenth book to read in bed, yearning  
for me, for the children, her ears burning.

![conch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3f/80/3f804bea-4b2d-4ddf-9ff0-6ec7d0afa5fa/content/images/2026/04/conch_wq1ozp7-1776425903071.jpg)

conch

Boat Ramp, Kawaguchi Lake, Honshu, Japan, Michael Kenna

**The Letters I Never Sent**

The miniature islands littering the sea,  
uninhabited, but each with its community  
of closed oysters, the fan-like debris  
of the tides, elegant as parlour embroidery.

Some tornadoes never reach the ground,  
whipping up an air which doesn't count.  
Swept up in that unnoticed passion:  
a telephone, a lousy noun, a weeping sound.

Nothing can compare, seem better than  
the wear and tear of constant measuring.  
Repeatedly, I tune the cello strings  
but someone else will bring the weather in.

The folly of an ancient, brittle atlas.  
Some die to map an error – although France  
was once an unknown concept, not a task.  
What commander is without her past?

![Letters.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3f/80/3f804bea-4b2d-4ddf-9ff0-6ec7d0afa5fa/content/images/2026/04/Letters_JkpXEZX-1776425903094.jpg)

Letters.jpg

Bathing Ghats, Hoogly river, Calcutta

Eva Salzman’s new collection of poetry is *Double Crossing*, ([Bloodaxe Books](http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852246618&ref=opendemocracy.net)).

Also in Shorelines, read the [first](http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-1-102-1966.jsp) of two extracts from Eva Salzman’s novel-in-progress, *Broken Island*.