Sunandita's "Beach" opens by turning a sunset into music: "I hum in rhythm with the light of setting sun." Light can't be hummed along with, yet the speaker does it, as if the evening had a tempo and the body had simply fallen in step. That small impossibility sets the tone for the whole poem. Nothing dramatic happens in it. A person sits on a beach, watches and listens, and ends by asking whether this might be heaven.
The poem is built as a slow widening and then a narrowing. The first eight lines look outward, and the speaker is almost invisible, a pair of eyes and ears. The second line, "Dancing on undulating frothy waves," has no clear subject. Is the light dancing, or the speaker? The grammar doesn't decide, and the blur suits a speaker who feels merged with the scene. The sounds help. "Undulating frothy" is full of soft, rolling consonants, and you can almost feel the water lifting and falling in the mouth. Then the world arrives piece by piece. "Somewhere a child giggles" is heard rather than seen, and the word "somewhere" keeps the child pleasantly out of reach. "Giggles" and "splashes" are lively, bubbling words, and the verb "playfully" makes the adverb do what the child is doing.
The woman collecting shells is the most interesting figure. The speaker sees only her "silhouette," a dark outline against the low sun, and so fills in the rest. "Maybe she will string those into a necklace, / Or simply, put them in a jar as souvenir." The speaker is inventing a future for a stranger, a gentle, harmless kind of storytelling. The word "simply" is telling, since it suggests the jar is the humbler choice, yet both options are ways of carrying the beach home. The wish to keep a moment, to make it into an object, sits quietly under the poem.
At line nine the camera turns inward. "I dig my toes deeper into the warmth of the sand, / And sip my pina colada." Until now the speaker has only watched and listened. Here come touch and taste, and the verbs become physical: dig, sip. Across the poem, then, four senses are in play (hearing, sight, touch, taste), as if the speaker were gradually letting the beach in. The phrase "deeper into" suggests settling and staying put, the opposite of the woman's collecting. She takes something away, while the speaker simply sinks in. The pina colada is a funny, honest detail. Judging by the imagery, this is a holiday heaven, with cocktails and sunsets, and the poem doesn't pretend otherwise.
The form is free verse with no rhyme scheme and no fixed line length. The opening line is long and swaying, and the lines shorten and loosen as the poem goes on, like a walk slowing to a stop. The last two lines are the plainest of all: "Is this what we call heaven / I sure do wonder." There is no question mark. The question slides into the statement, so the sentence reads less like a puzzle than like a murmur. "Sure" is relaxed, conversational, almost teasing. "Wonder" holds two meanings, to doubt and to marvel, and ending on it lets both stand. The speaker never answers.
That unanswered question is what makes the poem worth reading. It would be easy to write a beach poem that announces paradise. This one proposes it tentatively and lets the evidence pile up: a hum, a giggle, a figure picking up shells, warm sand, a cold drink. Heaven here is made of ordinary things, and it includes other people, even strangers seen only as a laugh or an outline. The speaker's contentment depends on their small activities carrying on nearby.
The poem also leaves a quiet challenge for the reader. If this is heaven, it is a version anyone could reach on a good evening, which suggests that heaven is partly a matter of attention. The speaker notices the light, the child, the shells and the sand, and that noticing is what turns a beach into something worth wondering about.