A Day in Dingle and Waking Inside the Sea ~ Video Poems by Rachel Elion Baird
About our Video Poetry Series
This series of video poems is an offering to the Ocean—her mystery, her memory, her pulse. These poetic currents invite you to pause and receive, to let sound and image wash over you. Through rhythm, metaphor, and deep listening, they open a space for feeling, remembering, and reconnecting with the Ocean as a living presence.
Our series poet, Rachel Elion Baird, offers up poetry as a language of shared experience. The majority of ocean poems included here are excerpts from the poetry manuscript Island Blues and were set to companion films for ONE by the author. Read more about Rachel below.
A Day in Dingle
In the afternoon
waves risen up like walls
unraveled to reach the tops of cliffs
paint them white,
The bay all froth and foam
ocean churning, making caves of the rocks.
And before that,
wind blown locals tossed about
on the streets, umbrella kites flying
wet faces calm in retreat
voices telling, this is Ireland.
Now it is all stillness again,
the veil of mist has dropped down into the sea,
even the birds drift by,
their wings silent.
Waking Inside the Sea (109th Wave)
Wet and feverish
you shout out dreams
like the churning waves
In the dark,
breath heaving, pushing out,
hips blossoming into a birth
Like all the other’s born
into a river of salted blood,
each one a different story,
Watching you watching, remember
high tide lines, water bodies washed-up,
surrendered,
How they slipped in when their mothers
were not looking, drank of salt,
became the ocean — one body.
Rachel Elion Baird was raised in San Francisco, California on the pabulum of the west coast literary and art renaissance. Baird’s poems are confessional, intentionally accessible and often visual, unfolding stories through descriptive imagery. She is a writer, artist, poet, and singer/songwriter whose work appears in numerous publications including New Millennium Writings, South Light, Persimmon Tree and Into the Void, as well as in experimental film and multi-media installations.
Baird is a member of the Edinburgh School of Poets and the author of two published poetry collections: Uplands, and Valentines and other Tragedies.
