In 1889, a little-known sonnet titled “Long Island Sound” was published by poet Emma Lazarus. All of the familiar elements of the Sound, from the sea breeze and rhythmic tides to sailing ships and jostling dune grasses, manage their way into her fourteen fleeting lines. “All these fair sounds and sights,” she concludes,” I made my own.” And even though her words are more than a century distant from our day, all whose lives have been touched by the shores of Long Island Sound will find some ageless truth in that sentiment. Inasmuch as these brackish waters are a shared bounty, so too are they uniquely possessed in full by each soul they welcome. The Sound becomes us all with intimate exactitude.
I was raised by the Sound amidst the sand and salt marshes of Old Pochaug, my years metered on the rhythm of breaking waves cast by itinerant winds from Westbrook Harbor. To the west, the Rivers Patchogue and Menunketesuck vanished into the Duck Island Roads. To the east, the sun rose over sand beaches that receded into silhouettes softened by the haze of salt air. I flourished upon the shores between, among time-worn jetties and pitch pines and sentinel islands. So when Lazarus sung of the “laughter of children unseen”, know that she was singing of me. And when she drifted in reverie to “see it as it looked one afternoon in August”, she surely saw my footprints vanishing as the Sound swallowed up the sandbars. And when she spoke of “the luminous grasses, and the merry sun”, of the “shining waters with pale currents strewn”, it was my eyes with which she gazed.
Indeed, these are the fair sounds and sights that I made my own, and which I offer to you in the hope that you find something of yourself in them, as well.
