Sand, Time & Summer

Parched gusts
in heated rage
fan littered streets
of human dust.

Pages of paper news
float in hot circles
coke cans rattle
rolling empty

Streets half-empty
of 4-wheeled ovens;
desert roads
a soulless shimmer.
The caravans are gone
the oasis crowded,
canned holidays
rattle rolling empty

Hot sands
full of people
on beaches
of no release
flee hot streets
and houses
of discontent…
scorching hollow as
Coke cans empty.

Is that all?
Another season goes
With a time-man’s
sand between
my toes
and in the surf
Coke cans wash,
floating empty.

I turn over my
New Year leaf
another page of
heat-blown whirl
wind scenes?
will life continue
as Coke cans rattle
rolling empty?

1977 © Wayne David Knoll, St Kilda East, Victoria, Australia

Originally Published as "Tourist City Summer" in ‘Theos Sun’ Summer 1977-8

[The world over, tourism and trash go together like the take-up and put -dowm of fashionable celebrity love-lives. This was my second poem to be published. I believe it may owe something to the book of Ecclesiates.]