The poet spent her summers in Malibu as a kid. This poem has never been published.
It was Malibu where our lips
were their pinkest hue
with Pollyanna attitudes
we’d paint on stunning smiles.
Standing pier-side on the seaweed shore,
half-dressed in string bikinis?
we’d gaze beyond the wild blue.
Time was irrelevant back then
assuming the role of blithe beach girls,
listening to the fires flirt
long into the night,
friends to our ears like seashells.
Boys would gather to boast
with their boards and the sunlight
seemed more brilliant back then?
waiting for the ocean’s break
to bathe us deep inside our bones,
swallowed into another world
ebbing and flowing on a bed
of sand, until one day it vanished
as though it had never been?
leaving with me here
bare-lipped and longing
within.
Carol Lynn