Blue 

She's thinking someday she'll return
to this place, this land filled with chocolate skinned
people and bright cawing birds, this green steamy
island with lopsided ice-cream cone mountains,
next to a puddled sea.

Maybe when she's sixty, or possibly later,
she'll find some ship willing to stop, motor
her in to this stout mound of rocks and pale
wooden cross beneath the coconut tree.
She may be remarried, or possibly not.
Perhaps a grown child will come with her.
Perhaps not.

One thing she knows: she won't cry.
Not when her tears have already slashed
new paths for streams to rush to the sea.
She won't think about how they danced
on their foredeck, celebrating this adventure
to one day look back on.
She won't think of how his hair shone
in the sunlight or that his eyes were the color
of midnight when stars rim the sky. Most of all,
she won't think of that gater, waiting,
or her last sight of him, diving,
his body a blurred arc of flesh over blue.



Pris Campbell ©2006



Note: Several years ago, I  read an article in Cruising World magazine about a couple who'd pulled into a small atoll in the Pacific. They chose to anchor in a secluded anchorage away from the village on the other shore. The water was murky and they were in close to shore. When her husband didn't surface, the woman got the attention of the villages who told her if they'd come there first, they could've warned her that gators lived in the waters on that side. They found her husband's body stuffed into a tree root, waiting to be eaten. Once I dreamed about sailing around the world. I managed the whole eastern seaboard on a 22 footer then, as they say, 'stuff happens' and the bigger dream didn't come true. I could identify with this woman and it horrified me. 

Palm Tree found on 100 Plus posters