Homage to a Swimming Pool

It was a summer like many others at the Community Park pool, with blue umbrellas and well-tended purple coneflowers gazing skyward at the entryway,

and blazing stars playing off the banners stretched across the main pool.

Sun and shadow played upon the walls of the dressing rooms,

whose patterned weatherings spoke so richly of the years.

Clock hands counted hours slowly,

and whistles 'round the watchful lifeguards' fingers twirled, as timeless summer days sped by.

By Labor Day, the last day for summer and for this pool, the flowers had faded,

to merge with deeper greens.

The sun cast no shadows, and it was time to take some last shots of what will soon be gone.

Forty years of passing days, arcing suns and summer squalls, etched in a wall.

Wondrous space where in is out and out comes in,  welcoming breeze and tips of trees,

sheltered but not enclosed,

seamlessly shifting from in to out.

Up the spiraling stairs, perched on stilts,

gentle authority spoke from humble highrise,

voice reaching round the rounded shrubs,

whose soft ramparts sheltered birds,

and others who might wish to fly.

There were town folk tan with splash gargantuan,

and a past Olympian

who cut

the water

clean.





It seemed, as final lengths were swum, the rippled light could dance forever 'cross the bottom of the pool,

but in the end, time ran out on the timeless. The well-aged words of closing came, to ask the scattered to be gathered, the gathered to disperse, reminding us that all goodbyes come by and by.

A place so welcoming of people and the elements will now to the elements return. For sun and shadow, birds and bathers, a new year will bring new habitat.

May this place play long upon our memories.