Little Breeze Lifting Hair

Robyn Sarah in The Essential Don Coles has collected one of his marvels — a portrait of a young son at play at the seashore and the play of the breeze in his hair. All by itself the image is conveyed with lightness and gentle repetition however Coles's pretty picture gains by a telescoping of time in the last lines:

a little breeze passing by
on its way to oblivion —
as this day is on its way there too,
and as that day, twenty years ago,
was, too.

Go see how Coles captures the child's laughter. The whole poem, "My Son at the Seashore, Age two", is available online at http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/coles/poem2.htm along with others.

And so for day 358
07.12.2007