Summer Haibun
The summer’s long light fills with bright lemons, melons, corn,
all the silken thoughts. It languishes under a splashy beach umbrella
with dominoes and Scrabble, with children digging fingers and toes
into sand where facets of sunlight bead cascades along windy waves,
run of shorebirds sweeping the horizon before the gray cityscape.
This summer is for a young mother jostling her baby in low tide as we
doze off on the soft lull of water lapping the shore, under a feathered sky
of oncoming sunset. This is the time of day when curtains billow
at windows in soft light, when sun squints through above a rippling bay,
when summer knocks at the door and we answer,
the wail of seagulls
winging wild above a catch
eyes fixed past us
She, sister who reads this poem
…I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read / there where you have landed… —Adrienne Rich
I imagine you standing at the stove on a breathy night before
an open window, breeze flirting crisp white kitchen curtains,
one hand at the hip, the other stirring soup, tasting, adding
a bit of basil and lemon thyme. Imagine you musing about
this poem as it quiets like a child off in the next room into
something. Something taking your attention, startling, stirring
outside the lines of unshorn weeds choking flowering sage
you will get to once you have read this poem again, rising
from bed, words blurring your eyes in a half-wake state,
some foggy mess of meaning you chase after and cannot catch.
I imagine you, she who reads this poem, stirring toward the day
ahead, alone and unafraid, surefooted along a sandy beach, past
sandcastles, shells, tossed limbs and bulbs of seaweed at your feet,
all part of the poem. Imagine another woman, the invisible one
pushing a broom through dusk lit halls, poem in the pocket of a
cleaning cart next to disinfectant spray. And the borrowed woman,
poem tucked at the back of a stroller rolled out to the walk, she
reading this poem at water’s edge, arms flung wide to morning.
I imagine you, sister who reads this poem, braving a ridgeline along
the bay on your own, poem pulled from a backpack at night’s campfire
then carted carefully back to the pup tent like a child quieted,
belly full of hobo stew and s’mores. Like a wind so soft it passes
barely noticed across a piney wood, I imagine you, she who reads
this poem, barely stirring yet part of the poem, its fire and its flames.
Andrena Zawinski
Andrena Zawinski’s most recent poetry collection is Landings. Her writing has received accolades for free verse, form, lyricism, spirituality, social concern. Her fourth book of poems, Born Under the Influence, is forthcoming in 2022 along with Plumes, a collection of flash fiction. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she founded and runs the popular Women’s Poetry Potluck and Salon.