Nancy Ellison's poem comes with no map and no caption, and that is how it works. It is lowercase and unpunctuated, and it offers fragments of cliff, chalk, sea and sand that slowly gather into a story of a parent and a dead son. At its centre is grief that has soaked into a place. The speaker looks at a white shore and can no longer see it as anything but the spot where a child died.
The opening builds a surface that cannot be trusted. Weed "hides rock", and "white deceiving chalk / could crumble under dead pine". Everything covers something else or is about to give way, and the modal verb "could" keeps the collapse hovering. Death is already in the scenery, in the "dead pine", before the son is mentioned. Yet the speaker says "i would risk those cliffs down to sea", ready to descend anyway. The poem does descend, from cliff to water to the sand where it ends.
Next the landscape turns into a body. "My eyes have greeted you / my tongue and lips felt your chalk white" is the language of a lover or a returning traveller, with the land addressed as "you". Then comes the denial: "no kiss that touch". That can mean contact with no tenderness in it, or a touch too raw to be called a kiss. Meanwhile "white" keeps returning, five times in all. It is normally a clean word, but here it turns into chalk, dust and sand, dry and powdery and associated with erasure. "White first" can be read as the first thing seen on arrival, or as a colour that comes before everything else and will not leave.
Only halfway through do we learn where we are. "I have come from algier / my son" can be read as a statement or as an address, with the line break leaving it open. Together with the closing "marseille", the place names suggest a sea crossing, and "where boats stop" can be a landing or a halt. The poem does not say why the speaker travelled or how the son died, and a reader should resist filling that in. What it gives us is sensation: "the heat is here still / with us". "Still" means both "yet" and "motionless", so the heat seems to have crossed the water with the speaker like luggage.
Then the register breaks. "My son dead in white cunt sand" is deliberately shocking, and it blends the beach with a female body. The "you" that was greeted and almost kissed now seems to have taken the child in, as if birth were reversed. Whether this voices rage at the place or simply raw speech, the crude word shatters the hushed tone that came before. The last lines tangle the senses further: sand "could scream white dust", and the speaker can "smell your scream". Dust is dry and silent, and a dead boy cannot cry out, so the landscape does it for him. Smelling a scream feels like how trauma works, with one sense leaking into another. Because "marseille" closes the poem without punctuation, it is unclear whether the city is being addressed or named as the place where the smell hangs. "Your" could belong to the son or to the city, and the grammar will not settle it.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run from two words to eight, and each break works like a held breath: "my son", "with us" and "white first" all stand alone. Hard k and c sounds scrape through the text in "chalk", "crumble", "could", "cliffs", "kiss" and "scream", giving it a brittle, gritty texture that matches the chalk. Lowercase levels everything, even "i" and the names of cities, so the speaker seems small against the scene.
The poem's strength is that it withholds the facts. Because we never learn the cause of the death, the grief is not tied to one event, and we are left with the experience itself. The reader has to assemble the meaning from images, much as the speaker seems unable to arrange the pieces into a settled account. In a few lines it joins travel, the body, the land and loss, and it makes whiteness, usually a colour of peace, feel like an accusation.