Here’s another one from the fantastic Poetry 180 site. It reminds me a little bit of the summers I was 11-12-13, growing up in central Florida. I was not old enough to be working full-time in the summers yet, though I did lots of babysitting. But what I remember most about those summers are days are lakes, beaches, and swimming pools. I practically lived in the water. I wasn’t a sunbather, and the era is different, but the mood of this poem so captures those days I spent playing water volleyball, drinking sodas, reading books, and "tossing a glance through the chain link at an improbable world." And maybe parading the concrete a little.
From "The Summer I Was Sixteen"
Geraldine Connolly
The turquoise pool rose up to meet us,
its slide a silver afterthought down which
we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles.
We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy.
Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted
up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool
lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,
we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete,
The Poetry Friday roundup is at the Julie Larios’ Drift Record. Happy Poetry Friday!