Jill McKeowen’s ‘Umina Imprinted’

From Sunday Morning, Here

The sun and crowd have left the beach
to a wall of leaden sky
and low tide printing waves, set after set,
for a boy on a board
mucking about in the white edge.

It’s quiet on the dunes away
from new streets and subdivisions, the flash of houses,
colour-bond yards, queen palms
glossing over
old points of reference:
the unfilled scrub
of burrawangs, paperbark and banksia.

Glass-front mansions have snapped up views
along The Esplanade, a graded
back-track once
for holiday flats and lettings,
where all the year
sand and wind swept in between the weatherboards.

And down on West Street, too many cars
are inching
frame by frame
beside the spill of coffee tables,
past the ghosts
of girls in Levi 501s outside the shut shops
on winter Saturday afternoons,
smoking, watching, waiting for chance:
a slowing car
of surf-haired boys, that Golden Breed.

My sense of place slides
about
like the boy on his board negotiating
waves, each one
a moment of change becoming
a past that’s fixed
but can’t be held
in the ceaseless roll to shore.