Light Lines and Where the Sea Meets an Island ~ 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.
Light Lines
I would explain witnessing the soul of the sea
as lapping tongues of fire meet this flowing water
sounding of the drag of brine and foam against stones,
steady in-and-out motion — her body turning,
inside this all life is begun and quelled.
She remembers her making,
how she was shaped and birthed so long ago,
with just a single breath and then another
holds and makes the ghostly
become her — no separation in the waiting.
A line of light appears on the horizon
where the sun breaks through cloud cover,
meets the curve of wave, here
ocean reveals herself,
rises up to embrace her lover, her star.
Where the Sea Meets an Island (111th Wave)
1
Swaying before her, past and future,
ash-strewn leaves along the path,
saltwater pearls and foam wait
for her return, always returning
until, there, she becomes firmly planted,
alabaster skin pillars in sand — an anchor
in the hypnotic dance of tide
shimmering wave edges
like petals strewn at her feet.
11
All of this is mostly hidden
under the cover of night,
nightly, looking for nothing
only now and then, finding
the silver moon reaches into water,
farther along the shoreline,
steady rise and fall
catches her shape, flickers
a moving echo of its own light.
111
White-tailed does follow their leader,
called from a thicket, visible, indivisible
towards the sound of turning,
to join night’s silver slipstream,
to leap, bathe, swim for the joy of it,
entering in, their cotton flashing like stars,
bodies press against walls of wave,
dark eyes seeing just above the crest
remembering, this is how they once came.
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.
