Friday, June 12, 2026

Summers on Montauk

Sitting in a deck chair, blue waves
topped by Florentine shimmers
scud the ocean into breeze
and a still life cliché while beautiful people
in bikinis holding beach reads
seek opiates of ennui and rum.

Beyond, far beyond the breakers,

the Atlantic rolls, heaves

twenty-foot gray waves holding up

a slate-gray sky and the chill of winter.

The Titanic strikes an iceberg

and the irony of nearer my God to thee.

 

In France, the Germans have taken hold,

and the Resistance burrows under soil

once used for love’s purple intoxication.

Anne Frank writes of hope in her attic

and the thousand natural shocks and joys

that flesh peering through a lens is heir to.

 

Flowers are thrown at GI’s, jeeps rolling

through villages of champagne and kisses

deep where liberation babies will breach

and look for Father Time’s American postmark.

 

It is all too much to take in, too far away

and just a dream, is it not?

Who can see the beyond the horizon

through Anne Hathaway sunglasses

and the foam of stoners playing in the surf.

A butler brings a tray of drinks

to the row of wooden chairs low to the ground.

 

The lifeboats cannot hold any more strays,

and didn’t the cannons cease fire

in the war to end all wars?

Good fences make good neighbors,

and the gray swells rise like stones

to keep at bay all that is not Montauk.


~William Hammett



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