Khalil Gibran:
I am forever walking upon these shores,
Betwixt the sand and the foam,
The high tide will erase my foot-prints,
And the wind will blow away the foam.
But the sea and the shore will remain
Forever.
It's an image of eternity that underlies reality, and beside which, all our lives, we are ever-walking, like a shore to an ocean. All the 'things' of the world around us are the foam on the crests of the waves that rise up from eternity.
Dan Fogelberg:
Pressed in the pages of some aging text
Lies an old lily, a'crumbling
Marking a moment of childish respect
Long since betrayed and forgotten
Time stills the singing a child holds so dear
And I'm just beginning to hear
Gone are the pathways the child followed home
Gone, like the sand and the foam
I'm confidently sure that Fogelberg was influenced by Gibran.