It hunts me on salty days
and stings the wild flesh of memory,
insisting upon my negligence,
my lack of love for wild coconuts and
sleeping iguanas crept up upon by
the cautious feet of nostalgia.

The days of shell seeking
between rocks are
over -
grown
now by villas and resorts,
creeping down the hillside like love-vine,
choking the ocean of its play.
We went there, you and I,
on sandaled Sundays full of wind,
and discovered South America
on our wavy coast,
the trash of a far away continent
a treasure to sand dusted conquerors.  

I should have tried to hold on,
to that feeling of cool, sweet delight
when after sun and salt and sand,
bucketfuls of dormant well water washed
our sun loved skin of freedom.

But the greed of a nation has swept
us all into the future of adulthood,
a land of money and progress,
of exiles and homesickness for
a place that no longer exists -
where I am left picking
imaginary tar from between my toes
left by those old South American ships.