Mockingbird Summer

Summer moves slowly on the Eastern Shore

The Eastern Shore


Summer

1.

In the Mockingbird Heat of Summer,
with Centennial Live Oaks draped
In Spanish moss;
in the breathless all surrounding sweat
Of a July summer night,
magnificent sun~sets across
Mobile bay,
and the languid slow moving souls on the piers
At night,
then there’s magic:
The Jubilee



A moonlit path follows dark tides
From point to point:
Drowned out into city lights
Dispersed by red buoys,
Tolling softly;
Cradled by lazy summer- breezes
They sway in bay waves
And mark the sailor way
Home.
Still the Eternal Heat
Presses down the Shore.



Her live oaks stand still,
Tall beneath the summer sun’s
Golden eye,
Spreading their arms across
Dirt paths and incline roads.
Brown down beaten old men push
Sawed trunks to wooden ships,
Set to sail to foreign lands
On the earth’s hot after-noon
Breath.
The sweat of soil fills in the night.

2.

Through the oaks covered in Spanish Ceremony they play: Branch to branch above the sun bleached old wooden house. The old Mobilian’ s ante bellum white-washed planked house once so stately , now a testimony to the summer storms she endured. Her steps lead up to the French panel door each step now warped and bent, curved from rusted nails holding the squared corners down. The steps of a generation spent in vacations of summers swept in on jubilee tides, across the Bay from the namesake street upon which she stands. In the front the old colored man tinkers with the sputtering lawnmower now almost as aged as he, paint peeling, his wrinkles etched in every skin. The porch swing silent and still as this summer crawls across the street down the bank to the waters edge. Time slows to a flow like thick honey oozing down the sides of a mason jar. Nothing moves.everything seems frozen in the Southern bluebird sky.