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.”