Beach cricket with four-year-old

A summer autism poem to warm up those of us freezing in the Southern hemisphere – and to chime in with the holiday vibe up North. If you don’t know what cricket is, just pretend it says ‘baseball’…

Beach cricket with four-year-old

Bat and ball
glow brightest summer yellow.
Mango-yellow; floatie-yellow; Slip’n’Slide yellow.
He loses patience
with hit and miss; prefers
to float them both—
mismatched vessels—
in the long flat lace-wash close to shore.
The water loves its new toys,
drags and tumbles them
never quite letting go.
He studies the shallows, points
at a bubble cluster.
“A galaxy! A galaxy!”
And suddenly the hollow
plastic things are flotsam
adrift on space-time;
an oblong and a sphere,
still loud yellow.
Rocket-flame-yellow; sun-yellow.

First published in Quadrant magazine, Nov 2009