Before most of Newport Beach, California, stirs, crews are already shaping the shoreline into order. Their quiet labor smooths yesterday’s stories into clean lines, a canvas ready for new beginnings. This poem, Rake Sand, Again, honors the unseen worth in work that vanishes by noon but carries dignity all the same.
🎧 Hear the poem aloud or read at your own pace—whichever speaks to you today.
Rake Sand, Again
By Scott Tilley
Four-thirty AM, headlights sweep Balboa Beach.
Yesterday’s footprints still whisper their stories—
runners’ straight lines, lovers’ tangled paths,
a child’s spiral dance around a found shell.
I guide the Zamboni of sand, electric hymn steady,
its rotating rake smoothing chaos into corduroy.
Behind me, a canvas of clean grooves stretches wide,
each line precise as a prayer, each mark a meditation.
The first jogger arrives at six-fifteen,
Rolex flashing, AirPods tuned away from the shore.
He’ll never know I lifted champagne bottles
from last night’s proposal or straightened kelp into arrows.
Some mornings, dolphins surface beyond the break,
watching me erase and create, erase and create.
They understand the rhythm better than the owners
of glass houses stacked along the bluffs.
By noon, ten thousand feet will have written
their urgent passages across my tablet of sand.
Tonight, the tide will edit everything.
Tomorrow, I’ll return with my rake, my powered prayer,
content in the worth of work done well—
the joy of shaping something clean, brief, and true.✍️ Poetry Matters from Spirituality Today