SUNDAY POETRY: "BUCKROE, AFTER THE SEASON, 1942"

BUCKROE, AFTER THE SEASON, 1942

by Virginia Hamilton Adair 

Past the fourth cloverleaf, by dwindling roads   

At last we came into the unleashed wind;

The Chesapeake rose to meet us at a dead end   

Beyond the carnival wheels and gingerbread.

Forsaken by summer, the wharf. The oil-green waves   

Flung yellow foam and sucked at disheveled sand.   

Small fish stank in the sun, and nervous droves   

Of cloud hastened their shadows over bay and land.

Beyond the NO DUMPING sign in its surf of cans   

And the rotting boat with nettles to the rails,   

The horse dung garlanded with jeweling flies   

And papers blown like a fleet of shipless sails,

We pushed into an overworld of wind and light   

Where sky unfettered ran wild from earth to noon,   

And the tethered heart broke loose and rose like a kite   

From sands that borrowed diamonds from the sun.

We were empty and pure as shells that air-drenched hour,   

Heedless as waves that swell at the shore and fall,   

Pliant as sea-grass, the rapt inheritors

Of a land without memory, where tide erases all.