Girl on a Beach, by Sara Palmer

Summer Musings, by Claudia Cameron (USA) 2017

Girl on a Beach
 
Smooth skin pinked up after
ocean’s bracing cold, 
her charcoal hair wildly tangled
by the surf, shot through
with seaweed; she’s glistening.
 
She turns away from the others,
gazing back at the endless waves,
the water calling her back 
before she’s even dry,
before she’s reclaimed by 
the sand, before she plunges
back into the life of her parents,
her friends on the beach.
 
She will come back to them, 
when she’s good and ready.
Now they see only the broad
blank slate of her back,
the twist of her torso
beneath a blousy bathing suit,
red-orange, striped and dotted;
childish. 
 
But her round thighs spreading
on the sand, are not a child’s. 
She sighs, and props one arm against
a bent knee, the better
to set her stance.
 
She will come back to them,
when she has to, when hunger
or thirst or the sound of laughter 
weakens her resolve.
Not yet though.
 
Not while she twists
with the visceral pull of tides, 
savors the salt-scented breeze,
cocks her ears to the crash-boom
of breakers. Not while she searches
out a thin line of horizon
with eyes no one else can see.

Sara Palmer   

Sara Palmer is a retired psychologist and an active writer, reader, hiker, knitter, and volunteer with literary and health nonprofits.   Her poems have appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal, Pen in Hand, and Poetry is Life: Writing with Yellow Arrow. She lives in Baltimore, MD.