My Summer of Love
while everyone was looking at threads, I posted this ragged poem…
My summer of love
is sweet-wrapped in polythene,
under slab-grey skies,
amidst a coronation
of umbrellas,
observing pageantry
from a distance.
My summer of love
is the elusive sprig
of samphire — the sunken
treasure at the bottom
of a salad bag,
or walking for miles
along sun-baked asphalt
seeking pools of leafy shade,
or gently prising apart the
pale chambers
of an iceberg’s heart.
My summer of love
was once a carefree idyll
cast through the prism
of a peacock’s eye
soft and feather-fringed,
quivering with promise,
just waiting to be discovered.
My summer of love
went ra-ra for a while,
every breath accompanied
by a bass guitar part,
it’s fixed focus lens
always blurring the edges
on the rare days
when I let the sun kiss
my bare arms
and a washed-out
charcoal vest
with twisted straps
dipped over my breasts
above a vintage skirt
in watercolours,
provoking a reaction
that was so long ago,
I can’t remember his name.
My summer of love
once clung to a hillside,
under a Giotto-blue sky,
spending the night
on marble platforms,
before being turfed out pronto
by the polizia municipale,
always dining alfresco
on bread sticks and gelato,
notably lacking a local ragazzo
to dally with — instead
filling a small sketchbook
with copies of lesser masters,
avoiding pervy shopkeepers
lurking in the doorways
of glass emporiums,
eager to flog their
millefiori paperweights,
choosing to wander
into the austere hush
of a velvet-dark duomo,
looking up at that vast cupola,
and sensing all the gold.
My summer of love
has been wound up abruptly
under false pretences,
by boring ground-strokers
via a punnet of strawberries
that cost a fiver,
and the pock-pock of a Wimbledon
that has barely started.
**
