Horace the Poet

Happy Coin Viewer, Folly Beach Pier, Folly Beach, SC  © Doug Hickok


Horace stood on the pier overlooking the sea. He did this everyday, all day, and even into the night. As people dropped their coins into the slot behind his head, and gazed through his eyes, he saw what they saw. But what no one could know about Horace was that he loved poetry, and invented poems in his head about all that he saw by the sea. 
You see, Horace was a poet.

He imagined poems about golden-crowned dawns suffusing the sea with flushes of scintillating color. He composed rhymes about seabirds dancing high in the bright blue sky. He recited sonnets about lovers strolling hand in hand along the ocean's edge. He smiled his peculiar round smile when he described children playing in the sand, molding their mountains or sculpting their castles. Because, for all that Horace saw by the sea, he was enchanted most by the children. "Ah",  he thought,
"what happiness it is to be so young, innocent, and free
 on that simple beach
by the sea...
if only for a little while."