First Love Poem by Charl JF Cilliers

Eagerly in the shade of rocks I’d wait
for her that brief and endless summer holiday,
despairingly if she were ever late
or if she came but could not stay.

We’d wander along the shore
as the tide went out, came in,
hands touching as we kneeled down to explore
the hollows under the ocean’s wrinkled skin

each day a self-sufficient kind of belonging
without passion or betrayal, yet all
summer and beyond another kind of longing
that later would seem so simple and so small

a spell when we rashly threw time away and words
like the breadcrumbs we fed the hoverings of birds.