My Friend, Her Grandson

^{Brigantine Beach}

I.

The wind is blue.
Blue, the boy tells me.
It dusts the reed-filled dunes,
then scuds across sand to water’s edge.

II.

We lie on the beach. Gray waves
advance, retreat. The blue wind, salt scrub,
scours my skin. Sharks troll for toddlers.
Patrol planes hum below the cloudy scrim.

III.

I climb the jetty’s ragged point.
From the churning reef,
I find the boy, a speck on the shore,
asleep on a blue cot. 

IV.      

His grandmother’s hand
soothes his damp head. She sings,
songs that lilt on the blue wind.
The jets drone on in steel-eyed formation.
           
V.

A black-headed gull arrows toward the buoy.

Copyright © 2023 by Pia Täavila-Borsheim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 24, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“This poem was written several years after the grandmother figure had passed away. She had been my best friend and sharpest-eyed literary critic for more than fifty years. It was a day during which such contrasting yet mostly harmonious seascapes were present: the lasting dunes, the wind, the water. And the young boy . . . where did he fit within the landscape? What would his future hold? This poem is also my prayer that he will not be swept into the violence of the military apparatus, represented by the planes overhead. He is now in middle school. I have great hope for him.”
—Pia Täavila-Borsheim