Six short lines are enough to wipe a person out. Thomas W. Morris's "Words In The Sand" opens with a verdict, "To me, / You are no longer human", and closes with a disappearance. Everything in between is as narrow as the strip of beach between one wave and the next.
The poem never says who "you" is or what has happened. A lover who has left, a friend who has drifted away, someone who has died: the text allows all of them, and that openness is part of its effect. What it does fix is the speaker's point of view. The opening words "To me" are easy to skip, but they change the sentence that follows from a fact into a perception. The person addressed has not literally stopped being human. The speaker has stopped seeing them that way. The reduction happens inside the speaker's own head, and the poem quietly admits it.
The central image is "words in the sand." Words are what remains when a person is out of reach: what they said, what was said about them, a name once written down. Sand is about the worst surface to write on if you want anything to last. The blunt "But" at the start of the third line does not just contrast, it subtracts. Take away the human, and what is left is a set of marks that can be rubbed out. A beach is also where people traditionally scratch names and initials, so the image carries a faint memory of affection, of someone once caring enough to write, even as it announces the opposite.
The second stanza supplies the eraser. "And when, / The tide comes in" says "when," not "if." The loss is not a threat but a timetable. The tide is also impersonal. Nobody in the poem is cruel enough to smudge the words out by hand, and the speaker does nothing at all. That passivity is chilling in its own way, because forgetting here is not an act of violence. It is simply what time does to anything left on the shore. Then comes a small grammatical twist. What the tide washes away should be the words, yet the final line says "You disappear." The metaphor and the person collapse into one another. In the first stanza the person had been turned into words, and by the last line no gap is left between the two. The person goes as completely as a sentence under water.
The form quietly supports all this. Two three-line stanzas mirror each other, the first stating a condition and the second its consequence. There is no rhyme, and the end words "sand" and "disappear" do not chime, which suits a poem about things failing to hold together. The lines are uneven, running roughly two, six and five syllables in the first stanza, then two, four and four in the second. The poem shrinks as it goes, as though it were itself receding. Both stanzas begin with a two-syllable fragment ("To me," "And when,") cut off by a comma and a line break. In the second, that comma after "when" leaves the reader hanging, much as you wait for a wave you know is coming. Each line also starts with a capital, even in the middle of a sentence ("The tide," "You"), so every line lands as a separate, deliberate step. The effect is flat and even, like a voice working hard to stay level. The last word, "disappear," ends on a long, open vowel that trails away rather than stopping.
That level voice is the poem's most interesting feature. On the surface the speaker is cold, declaring someone no longer human. Yet it takes imagination to picture a name on a beach and a tide moving toward it, and nobody invests that much in a person who means nothing. Judging by the imagery, the coldness may be a defence, a way of rehearsing indifference before it is real. The poem's quiet power lies in the gap between what the speaker says and what the speaker shows.
That gap is what makes such a tiny poem worth reading closely. It uses plain words and a single image, and it leaves the reader to decide whether the speaker is hardened, grieving, or both.