Long Weekend at Avoca

~Peter Stiles Early October, and the beach sings again with the voices of little children. Springtime comes in Kandinsky colours splashed across each ultra violet day, like parakeets blinding the ear with their screeching. My words are stayed in this heat. For the moment, warmth of the skin, colour of youth, flick of water, a sandy limb, there is nothing to shape but contentment. Waves, memories from childhood, wash in. A young woman, fair, with Celtic fairness, photographs patterns traced by tides on the rock face beyond the beach. She steps closer and closer, while others, oblivious, fish from the edge in their tanned silence. Earnest, but peaceful, she reads the poems I cannot write, poems about deep time and the meaning of summers.