"They Left Like Tides Going Out, Too Fast, Too Soon"

The Tide Took Them Before I Learn to Swim       

The poem "Gabu" masterfully captures the sea's unforgiving nature as both literal force and profound metaphor. Its imagery paints a coastal battleground where waves wage their eternal war against the shore, reducing what was once vibrant to a desolate wasteland.

This ceaseless conflict becomes a mirror for time's cruel puzzle it creates through destruction, reveals through erosion, and teaches us value through loss.

The poem's most devastating insight lies in its observation that what we forfeit becomes "most loved and dear." Like the shore that only understands its own beauty as it disappears

grain by grain, we humans measure love's depth by absence rather than presence. The sea's indifference to our attachments transforms into life's central tragedy we are granted the capacity for eternal love in a world bound by temporary conditions.

"It is the sea pursues a habit of shore"

This means the sea keeps doing what it always does crashing against the shore, wearing it down, never stopping. It’s not good or bad; it’s just what the sea does.

Just like some things in life happen no matter what we do, like time passing, people leaving, or situations changing. The sea is like those forces: unstoppable, uncaring, but not cruel. It’s just following its nature.

When I first read "Gabu", I admired its vivid imagery the brutal beauty of waves endlessly battering a defenseless coast. The poem spoke of time's erosion, of nature's indifference, in language that felt powerful yet comfortably abstract. It was literary analysis, nothing more.

Then the waves came for me.

My uncle's death was the first crash sudden, shocking, leaving me gasping on unfamiliar shores. Just as I found my footing, another wave: my grandfather gone a month later.

The sea doesn't hate the shore. It doesn't plan its assaults. It simply does what seas do, takes and takes, in rhythms we can't control. The poem's genius is in that word: "habit." Not a choice, not malice just the inevitable operation of nature's laws.

Some days grief laps gently at my ankles. Other times it drags me under completely. But unlike the shore at Gabu, I'm learning to resist erosion. The memories they left my uncle's support, my grandfather's words, these become my sea walls. The saying "This Too Shall Pass" relate to the last line because, like the tide all things are temporary the sharpest pains, the brightest joys. But what the poem doesn't say is this: while the sea always returns, so do we. Stronger. Wiser. More Resilient against the next tide. I understand "Gabu" differently now. The shore may be helpless, but we are not. We can build. We can remember. Most importantly, we can keep standing where the waves break hardest, knowing each retreating tide leaves something precious behind the enduring marks of what we've loved and lost. They live in my heart like a well worn shirt familiar, comforting, clinging to me without intention. I don’t choose to remember; the memories simply rise like waves, washing over me when I least expect it. A scent, a sound, a turn of phrase and suddenly, they are here again, as real as the salt on my skin after the tide has gone out. Grief is not a storm I weather, but a tide I learn to live beside. The waves will keep coming, but so will the memories soft as fabric, constant as the sea. And though they are gone, they are never truly lost. Like the imprint of a wave on sand, like the shape of a body in an old shirt, they remain.