First and Seventh Wave ~ 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.
First Wave
The road here winds along the coast
then, rises to a cliff.
PCH is the same, those long stretches
between Carmel and Big Sur
get washed away
on a regular basis,
coast line blurs
into no coast line
Sat there once
Where a river goes out to sea
eating trout and eggs
as the curve vanished
until all I could do was listen,
finding new sounds
the rushing water,
tines scraping across the plate.
forms islands
until we fill them back in.
Fog goes in and out there
all one blur
covers the rough,
disappears it,
then you have a given choice,
stop where you are or find the edge.
Seventh Wave
Under the influence
of super moon stories, eclipse,
this gray-blue enchantress
telling so as to not forget her rule,
she be like the ones that drown the gods:
Neptune went under, Poseidon, her toady,
so many fisher-men joined on a day like this.
But I am a woman
made in her likeness, I do not fear her calling,
walk in on a regular basis against that blaring
churning curl of her lashing,
spend all day inside there – a wild thousand things
turned around, just like her
I go crazy sometimes.
This is known as the ”sneaker” wave,
rising unseen to drag you into the depths,
though nights are growing longer again
there is still so little of them
as if mistaking July riptide
as making more light
when there is less and less.
Suddenly it is early,
first rays and the ocean is crashing down,
her glassy voice raised in celebration
of all she has moved in our sleep,
now she can show
what has been swept clean
or brought ashore, drowned.
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.
