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Haiku Free Verse Prosies
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She has hips
unfashionably wide,
but tanned, bikini-clad, and capable
of carrying her body back and forth across the sand
with a paddle in her hand.
At the ocean, the
clap of a hand,
the crack of ball against paddle
carries loud above the sound of the surf,
which drowns out our murmuring voices,
erasing names, words, whole sentences,
whole narratives. It drowns out
who their parents are
and where they come from
and what they do when they are not here,
at this moment,
on this beach.
He dives
in the burgeoning waves,
crying in a register unfashionably high.
She waits
on the sand for him,
watching with a loving eye
and when he crawls back across the water to her,
greets him with a towel,
picking up an empty wrapper as she goes.
I can't stop thinking
that the way he places his hands upon her hips right now
will be the same way he places his hands
upon her hips tonight,
in some private room,
before leaning down to kiss
the underside of her belly.
I can't stop thinking of the moment
when he will dive into her,
that he will say sweet things to her,
and her burgeoning moans.
I am in love with them both at this moment—
I love them with a swelling heart,
and open hand, an unfurling love
which encompasses all the animals on this beach:
the shreiking gulls, the children and their parents,
the young girls in their bikinis,
the zaftig woman in her two-piece,
the men in their hairiness,
the loud ones and the quiet ones,
the families and the lonely ones,
all that beauty,
all those rolls of flesh
all those crooks of nose,
all here on the beach,
loved by the ocean,
all loved, all open,
all beyond the sound
of our own voices.
— Frances Donovan
August 2004
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