Mara Bergman
The First Hot Day
Lunch-hour clusters of office workers
sip wine or dream into the plush grass.
A women pushes a pram,
a man plays ball with his son.
Someone elderly and thin and wearing a blue bikini
sprawls in the sun, face down, really somewhere else
where waves are crashing.
Hers is a solitary paradise.
She sits up and surveys the scene.
Bones baking, breasts bared to the sun,
she’s oblivious as anyone
on a beach in the Mediterranean
in the high season.
She floats back down to her towel
and stretches out again.
Boys aren’t jeering.
The police won’t be dragging her away.
Her grey hair drifts in the grass.
She is miles out at sea.
Page(s) 89
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