Beaches

For this, my 135th Saturday syde-tryp:  Beaches! Ah - sand, sea, warm skin, days of freedom and fun. I have a select few favourite places on earth and most of them feature a beach somewhere in the mix (Brixham, San Jose, Vai, any number of Greek islands, Blackpool - naturally). I love sandy margins, that sense of being on the borderline between land and sea, the marked contrast between permanence, solidity and constant movement, the expansiveness of coastal vistas, a certain quality of light, the tang of salt and ozone.

I left a little piece of my heart in San Francisco, whose Golden Gate Bridge - pictured from Baker Beach - is shown below. Not many visitors to the sainted city even realise the beach is there. They see the hills, the streetcars, the wharves, the parks, Chinatown, the pyramid, the Victoriana, the bridges...but not the strand that fringes the bay. Isn't it a breath-taking sight?


The Beach & The Bridge - San Francisco Bay

San Francisco is one of the few places outside of England that I'd be happy to live in. It was on my radar years before I ever visited in person because of the music scene it spawned in those faraway psychedelic sixties (Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service still being among my foremost musical loves) and the counter-cultural, community-focused lifestyle it espoused (hip, multi-ethnic, neighbourly,whole earth). I've been back several times and hope to do so again one day, to stroll on Baker Beach at sunrise or sunset (or both) and feel those good vibrations in the air.

Inevitably, given the above, this week's poem is a frivolous bit of hippy nonsense - and if you believe that, you'll probably believe anything!

A Frivolous Bit Of Hippy Nonsense
Once more unto the beach,
dear friend once more
tripping the light fantastic
with my baby
down by the San Francisco Bay;
she tide-eyed at the awning
of another golden-gated day,
me barefoot and beach-combing
while acid anthems play.

We time-capsuled for an infinite hour
on the shores of evermore,
bathed in orange sunshine
and skipping through the waves
of this psychedelic encore
pouring forth from the depths of ocean.

Love is, after all, the key
and perception of that universal notion
freed our hip nation into motion,
rejecting madhouse mores,
grooving happily out of reach
of the snares of frayed materialism,
the mortgaged and mundane,
rediscovering our innocence
and trailing clouds of patchouli.


Thanks as ever for reading. Have a nice day, S ;-)