The Resonance of Seashells

Joseph Geskey

She wants to share the ocean with you,
dipping her cupped hands into the water
until it overflows but arrives empty-handed.
Her first lesson, the importance of gestures.
She spends the next several hours building
sandcastles near the shoreline, waking up
the following day to see it washed away
by the moon’s gravitational pull over the tides.
A second lesson, where extracting a pinky
promise not to destroy her kingdom
from an annoying older brother doesn’t eliminate
the necessity of learning the equations
from unseen forces critical for success.
Her curiosity is rewarded when she finds
a conch shell on the beach and brings it home.
Told by her mother that you can hear the ocean
when you bring it to your ear. Years later,
a final lesson settling her mother’s estate,
the shell still carefully wrapped in a storage box,
the resonance of what remains
                                                       and what is lost.

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Joseph Geskey

Joseph Geskey works as an Internal Medicine physician in an underserved area in Columbus, Ohio. He has published two poetry collections, Alms for the Ravens (Mainstreet Rag Publishing Company) in 2024, and Vigil (Broken Tribe Press) forthcoming in 2026. Individual poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, Cloudbank, JAMA, Roanoke Review, and many others. Please visit josephgeskey.com for further details.