My Your Our Water
A while back, freaking 5 years ago already, I contributed a poem of sorts to a friends project. Submitted and forgotten till now. The moment described in the poem is truly writ upon my mind and I think of it often. Suspended between land and water, air and see, light and dark, hot and cool.
It was easy, binary, with that split second liminality. Now, perhaps it carries more binary bits and pieces. Youth and age, past and present...
The text is:
I can parse that memory, tell of the lawn party where adults raised cocktails to ward off humidity and heat, forays into the frosty air conditioning and slippery polished floors. The belly laugh of my grandfather as he would drop ice cubes into the bathing suits of the running children. Tell of days in the sun and in boats, beach combing or walking the sandbar at low tide, sunburns and brown skin. I can tear up knowing these are memories of home and family that I will never be able to have in a “real” sense again. A moment, this touchstone of memory is a path to a personal eternity, a point in time filled with the embrace of water, youth and a broken sun.
It was easy, binary, with that split second liminality. Now, perhaps it carries more binary bits and pieces. Youth and age, past and present...
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The text is:
“To
him who spread out the earth upon the waters, for his mercies are to
eternity.”
There is a memory I turn over endlessly.
A fleeting second of suspension above a broken sun and below the vault of heaven, between the firmament and the waters. Splitting a moment of toes digging into coarse Floridian grass and the release of that energy as inertia, an arc of gravity and the inevitable crush of cleaving water. The thunder of bubbles and pressure resolving to the clicking of oysters and underwater silence.
I can parse that memory, tell of the lawn party where adults raised cocktails to ward off humidity and heat, forays into the frosty air conditioning and slippery polished floors. The belly laugh of my grandfather as he would drop ice cubes into the bathing suits of the running children. Tell of days in the sun and in boats, beach combing or walking the sandbar at low tide, sunburns and brown skin. I can tear up knowing these are memories of home and family that I will never be able to have in a “real” sense again. A moment, this touchstone of memory is a path to a personal eternity, a point in time filled with the embrace of water, youth and a broken sun.
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