Sand Castles

A castle built from the surrounding sand

Upon a beach where tides forever ebb and flow

Sometimes the plot is dry, sometimes beneath the sea

The material a careful fusing of sand and water

To make that stable mix that moulds

The walls, the keep, turrets, doorways and windows

And ramparts pierced with crenulations

A moat is scooped and a flag placed upon the tallest tower

The castle is complete

To last for all too short a time

Its fate obliteration by the coming tide

Components dissolved again to sand

With no trace of the edifice that stood before

Each grain now reunited with the golden mass around

Perhaps the castle is a metaphor for human life

Whereby not sand but human cells

Grow and mature to form each living soul

That lives until the coming tide of death

That quenches out each human life on earth

When our atoms like the castle’s sand

Can never be destroyed

But  redistributed to be reformed into another soul

To last until the next incoming tide

Ad infinitum