The Elation

Prompt: 9-20-14 – Message in a bottle
You are at the ocean, walking along the shoreline and you find a bottle with a message inside.
Words TO use: onion, reel, music, captive.
Words NOT to use: bottle, glass, open, water, write, salt, sand, rocks, stones, walk, the specific word ‘I’
Minimum of 30 lines; free verse or rhyme.


The Elation


Morning stroll as dawn tempers a glassy sea,
drifting across wave etched beach, round granite
outcroppings, shallow tidal pools. A clinking--
fragile yet musical, sound catches the corner
of my ear. Cork-stoppered, clear
ly holding a secret within.

Onion-skinned parchment covered with scribbled ink,
a date from a century prior to aimless amble--
inscribed in French—miniscule, printed letters.
No deciphering the words
Another hour can make little difference.
Mind reels considering the journey more than the message.

Author long since dead, no saving here
except, perhaps, the secret or will
it be lost further in translation?
Sipping freshly brewed coffee
as magical dawn blossoms into freshening day
a friend arrives to unravel the mystery.

Brow wrinkled in concentration, lips silent
ly forming words beyond my ken, she lifts
puzzled eyes to mine, looks to the horizon,
smiles. “What did you do this morning?” Thinking
back then speaking of pondering journeys; motivations.
She nodded and began to read:

Stranger, where will you be? On what continent
or distant shore? Will finding this spark imagination
to bubble over, to add wonderment to gild your day?
No lost soul but just an old performer who now
chooses to juggle ideas. You caught one of three.
Was it the message or the journey that caught your fancy?

Did you contemplate time gone by, envision desert isle waif?
Consider storms that swallow ships yet safe
ly delivered this into your keeping? Why who finds,
finds and not another. Why one finds joy in deferred curiosity.
This prayer for the finder that indeed the mind was captivated.
Should this be so, know from beyond, this juggler is elated.


NOTE: My grandmother, an enthusiastic juggler, once told me that when the juggler has all the objects in mid juggle, in that moment when he finds the rhythm and is touching none of the objects, that moment is called ‘the elation.’