Finishing Up The Semester

Yikes...this is my first post for May!

I am finishing up the semester, and summer is almost here, so let's include a summer poem.  Below is a picture of the beach in Greenland.  Not sure if it is near where my father was stationed.



Find Your Beach Where It Is

I.

In Greenland,
children play past midnight
on a rocky beach
without sand or seaweed.

Nearby flowers and lichens appear,
brightly wearing down boulders.
Tourists’ tents bubble on sand
like orange and green fungi
on a fallen log.

They do not squander summer.

 II.

The children in New England
fling ribbons of brown seaweed
and streamers of green
back into the water.


Adults swaddled in
gift store cover-ups
avoid the Atlantic’s bite
and the seaweed that clings
to every wader’s legs.

III.

 The young father and his sons
fish from the banks of the river
his grandfather once swam in.
It was clean.  It was decent.
He recalls from his wheelchair.

Sun sparkling on the water,
the green flourishing on the bank,
the white of new polo shirts,
hide dangers in the fish
that swim this river
the color of a great-grandfather’s memory.


This poem appeared in Kind of a Hurricane Press' anthology, Of Sun and Sand.  The picture below is of high summer at York Beach, Maine, where my parents used to live.



Enjoy this summer poem!  I think that it fits nicely with the previous poem I posted, "The River Always Captures Me."  :)