The more I read this poem, the more I love it. The title is evocative and mythic. We plunge right in with the speaker from the start, in the action of swimming to shore. But then we’re in a dream of a daughter told by a mother. “Daughter-hair” slips through the mother-dreamer’s fingers, like time does, for all of us. This is a poem of time, told in what feels a place out of time, but also a place steeped in time, and elemental. Post-dream telling, we are back in the world, where these two speakers both have daughters who are now grown and are also grown daughters themselves, of now-gone mothers. The middle of the poem is the ashore time, on a rocky coast that these two women lie down upon in what feels a ritual. Steeped in matrilineage, the poet writes of wombs, of bodies over time, of slippage, of strength, of how we begin in the cells of our mothers, of how those mothers are now gone, and of how we birth our own daughters. The slipping hair, the falling stones, the gone grandmothers—this poem feels quietly epic, earthy, cyclical, and beautiful. —Rebecca Hart Olander