Turning Tide

We really shouldn’t have done it,
stealing away like that together,
nearly naked beneath the blazing sun.
A lecture was bound to follow—

such a flagrant waste of calories
during that summer of your convalescence.
But how could we resist the insistent call
of that glimmering day?
 
We began on a beach beneath an empty mansion,
where a rustic cottage casts a steady gaze upon a placid sea.
I was looking over your frail shoulder,
watching waves break on the shoreline of another day,
when you played here as a child.
 
You asked me what it feels like to be old.
I recited a few verses, newly minted,
about my growing sense
of a receding horizon of possibilities.
 
You were quiet as we strolled beneath the eleven palms,
dodging swollen logs dislodged from distant shores,
watching furtive sandpipers dart by in orderly rows,
their tiny prints dissolving as quickly as they appeared.
 
And then all the moments of the past
fell in line along the strand,
and all the promises of the future
came rushing forward around our feet,
and I knew that your strength would endure.
 
Why else would you have asked?
 
Because you, too, would one day have a story to tell
about what it feels like to be old,
and perhaps a curious daughter of your own,
walking and playing on this same beach.
 
Many years from now—
long after I have forgotten what day it is,
the sound of seabirds
and the meaning of hope—
after my life is spent and
my ashes mingle with your footprints
on the margin of this land,
you will be here to recall
the expanding horizons of that stolen afternoon,

and the quiet strength that drove you,
step by step, ounce by ounce,
to embrace the promise of another day.  
 
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