Weymouth Sands
Bodies abandoned to heat, inert,
Lured, seduced by the sun;
Transmuted flesh out of time, mind:
Touched, tinged, roseate
Or burnt on tropical, golden, eternal
Afternoons; on sands adorned
With glittering detritus of summer.
All gaudy habiliment shed; nakedness
Bereft of identity, possessions,
Passions, lying like posthumous ones
After battle: abandoned, anonymous, bereft.
After Life’s lost cause defeated them:
And yet, still oddly inviolate, oddly beautiful.
Perhaps in sleep, perfected bodies
Curling, toes curling tightly -
Not upturned in salt, sandy earth -
Dream of days of sunlight
On sultry flesh, oiled and pleasured;
Formal, undesiring
In afternoon’s oblivion;
Golden, azure, hermetic, unseeing:
Not seeing seabirds, sailing, patient
As vultures, wafting on a whisper
Of the rarest of zephyrs; patiently,
Gracefully sailing: waiting; waiting.
Page(s) 156
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