A Poem by Marianne Szlyk

Driftwood on Tybee Island

     -- after an image by Mary Judkins

Colorful and rough,
driftwood on Tybee Island
claims the photographer's gaze.
The branch's yellows and browns
echo the dogs racing on this beach,
frolicking in summer waves.
The sand is blue, white, and yellow,
sticky and sweet, clinging
to the feet of tourists and locals alike.

The warmth of the fierce surf
blesses rather than braces
bathers and waders,
humans and canines.
It even blesses the driftwood
before it burns away
all the colors and textures
that the photograph preserves.



Marianne Szlyk recently published her first chapbook, Listening to Electric Cambodia, Looking Up at Trees of Heaven, at Kind of a Hurricane Press:  http://barometricpressures.blogspot.com/2014/10/listening-to-electric-cambodia-looking.html.  Her poem "Walking Past Me. Calvary Cemetery in Winter" has been nominated for the 2014 Best of the Net.  Individual poems have appeared in print and online, most recently in Poppy Road Review, bird's thumb, The Flutter Journal, Of/with, Walking is Still Honest, and Literature Today as well as Kind of a Hurricane Press's anthologies., most recently Switch (The Difference).  She edits a poetry blog-zine at http://thesongis.blogspot.com/ and hopes that you will consider submitting a poem there or voting in one of its contests.