Always Summer

Always Summer

Because our memories tell us so,
the air is always blue with summer,
yellow gorse explodes as heat
deseeds the grass and skies wobble
in our swimming eyes.
No matter how plain it is to see
snowdrifts piling against the hedge,
voices, pleasant with reassurance,
announce summer, somewhere deep
yet irretrievable,
somewhere we are never lost
and always children, insubstantial,
light with weather, like our songs.

Out on this point of beach
I walked to as a boy, bright days
of breeze and shingle in my toes,
I visit now as pilgrimage
to remonstrate with memory
the way that rain and days of grey
are sublimate to blue and dazzling light.

I have no understanding,
no knowledge of the memory's
transformations, how perhaps
it was winter once or autumn
leaves were trodden underfoot,
ponds were interlocked with ice,
robins frozen on the lawn
or foghorns sounding from the coast;
how summer infiltrates our sense
of what was always once our childhood;
how our children's futures fill
with certainties of light.