Is gary snyder still alive

In the poem A Mongoloid Child Handling Shells on the Beach, poet Snyder describes a child turning seashells over by her slow hands and compares this to how the sea tumbles shells on their way to the shore.

He describes them as broken bits from the "mazarine maze" and says that they are the calmest things on the sand.

In the second stanza, he draws an image of unbroken children splashing and shouting, rough as the surf and “gay as their nesting towels.” He then refers back to the main subject saying that she plays soberly with the “small change of the sea and hums along with its long slow vowels.

The poem ‘A Mongoloid Child Handling Shells on the Beach’ presents a beautiful contrast between the normal children and the mongoloid children by an economic use of metaphor.

To find out the meaning of this poem, we must understand the title. There is a girl at