Just Friday

(a spontaneous poem from the beach)

It’s forty-five degrees, and the water feels even colder,
But I splash in the foam like Aphrodite, 
even though I’m almost sixty.
And I’m NOT SHOPPING.
A kite is suspended in the sky,
so much wind that no one at all is holding the string,
and it stays suspended for hours,
and the kite is NOT SHOPPING.
A child builds palmetto fronds into an altar in the sand,
a  child NOT SHOPPING.
A boy out in the ocean paddles by on some board,
paddling along in the ocean, 
looking for all the world like Jesus,
and certainly Jesus would not be shopping.
Two dogs whirl around each other ,
joy sparking off of them like the flash of Venus in the night,
like the Pleiades in the dark moon night,
and today is just Friday, and no one is shopping.

Annelinde Metzner
Isles of Palms, South Carolina
November 25, 2011