Summer Solstice 2024
My day - for you.
I woke this morning early, pre-dawn, and listened to the world awake around me. I read some beautiful things here on Substack, and comments and messages from friends, then I posted this Note:
“Happy Summer Solstice from Australia…..
It’s early morning here, and I’m off to the beach where the Summer light will lick me like a dog and the waves will wash it all away before I lie in the sun again. I will try to come back with a poem - if I can catch one of those slippery silvery elusory fish…. :) “
Well, I’m back now, and this is what I wrote, and these are the images I brought home for you.
Come with me to Summer:
Summer Solstice 2024 First I photograph the moon - half hearted, disregarded, slipping out the Western door silently - lonely Poet leaving a party. But up above Bar Beach the sun is living its best life - Instagrammed and ignited - delighted by our semi naked adoration. For this is the Sun’s day - the sea and the beach the stage. Each green incipient hill of water holds a surfer, poised, potentiated, then projected into a brief kinetic future multiversed with outcomes. In this one the sea arches, curls, cups the board, leans over to seal itself cylindrically - the lone surfer accepted inside ocean kissed with liquidity blessed with white foam then released and for this one pierced moment transcendent, perhaps transformed. All along the sand the Summer pilgrims, divested of clothes and identity, anointed with warm oils, kneeling and lying on multi-coloured beach towels, prayer matted together with all the memories of other days or all the possibilities that this day might still bring. Clumped in families or spread out in self perceived hierarchies of arcane beauty they are glued, glommed, welded to a oneness they did not have before, may never have again: These small children ankle deep, double daring the sea’s sharp edge. Those briefly unincarcerated adults planting beach umbrella flower beds; And this young woman next to me, with a smooth face unremarkable which - 10 years, 20 from now - will grow beautiful grooves and lines I will never get to see holds up her phone for all of us as a techno talisman, an image keeping amulet; sign of our faith in this faithless, all too perfect, all too transient, briefest longest day.
Merewether Ocean baths - soon after dawn of the Solstice - where I came to swim laps
Bar Beach umbrella blooms, the place where I came to write
Waning gibbous moon - exeunt stage West.
I don’t know who you are, but if you have read this far it probably means you liked what you found here. If so - please do hit “like.”






Let us compare solstices …
Waiting for the NZ sun to finally entice me into some semi-naked adoration, and meanwhile holding onto my techno talisman 😎