Regina (Gina) Piroska

By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia

Heat hangs, torrid, pressing upon tired shoulders.

Touched by the occasional warm starfish an ancient, patchy, bird-shit monument kneels in puddled sand beneath a sky stitched to the sea.

below blue
sails billow
over blue

Ripples circle the rock where, in the tide’s cloud-crawl, tiny crabs get on with their crabby lives and I wonder how words can convey this sense without images to the eye.

On this slow, tedious, amplified afternoon, I lean against the colossus baffled by the clamour of these idiot gulls, ignorant in the art of give and take, because it’s perfectly clear who should yield.

crushed
shell in a footprint
empty beach

First Published in Drifting Sands Haibun, January 2022
~ Adelaide B Shaw guest editor.