Don Clermont currently holds a B.A. in French literature and has published literary research in Bishop’s University’s Journal of Eastern Townships Studies. As an emerging writer, he has also published poetry in SUNY Plattsburgh’s Z-Platt, 50 Haikus and Z Publishing House’s New York’s Best Emerging Poets. A few of his favorite contemporary poets are Nick Laird, Lloyd Schwartz, and Maria Nazos.

Describing the Beach to an Android

Well, firstly there’s sand—it’s hot and sticks to your back when you lay in it and it’s composed of eroded minerals that surround large bodies of water. But people come from all around to lay in sand with their best friends and let salt water dry in their hair.

Then there’s the sea and tanning women—certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, traveling at a certain speed in the atmosphere, reflect off surfaces and into our eyes. But each color is perfect and evokes different emotions in sentimental young men.

There’s also the tide which is controlled by the moon’s orbit at high and low. But this is what makes children jump excitedly when water comes in to wash away their sandcastles. And parents watch as boys in blue shorts laugh and grow older.

Then there’s the sun and the atmosphere—light comes from hydrogen fusion and it scatters at different angles in the gaseous mixture of oxygen and nitrogen and this gives the sky a bluish complexion. But on the horizon, the sun appears to give off different colors at the same time which is the second most satisfying part of being human and it’s called a sunset.

Waves crash on the beach while some water flows out into what’s called a riptide and people like to swim in the waves and others ride on top of them. But some children drown this way and their mothers still hear their laughter at night when they sleep.

And as the moon rotates around the earth, it’s illuminated by the light of the sun and this dictates our calendars. But it’s still very mysterious to us so we hypothesize about the Theia collision and write poems about it. And at night, people come out of their houses into the cool darkness to admire the moon and they
fall in love looking upward.

Are you computing? It’s hard to describe what people find beautiful. Plato said it’s when the soul remembers what it used to know when it had wings. And when people find beauty in each other, they fall in love, which is what’s so exciting about the sea.