24/7

It's Poetry Friday!   Yea!  And it is being hosted by Sylvia at Poetry for Children.  Hope you can drop in and help celebrate at the poetry party! 
Thank you Margaret, for featuring my Poetry Swap poem on your blog, Reflections on the Teche, today.  It was a real treat to write it for you!
My poem is at the end... you have to endure photos I've taken.  Fortunately for you, I did not include all that I took!

Love the cloud reflections!

It was too warm in the house, so tonight before supper, my husband and I drove a few miles down the road to the local State Park and around the island a bit.  We got out at the park and climbed the stone steps to the point that overlooks the ocean.  And I again marveled at the wonderfulness of being on vacation 24/7.  Even when I was working, it seemed that we always lived somewhere that felt like vacation when I got home in the evening.
Minnesota was our horse farm in the country, New Hampshire and Rhode Island homes were in the woods, and now back to real home in Maine, we have been near or on the coast.
I have never "needed" a vacation.

A couple of weeks ago I saw this on our garage:

Luna moth sunning himself - herself?

Last week a I saw this:

Sunset by the dock

A couple of days ago I saw this from my front livingroom window:

Great Horned Owl - up high and very large and very loud!

 And this from my front door window:

A young deer on my front lawn - very quiet, very hungry!

 Then down the road about 6 miles, last night I saw this:

1 mile of beach - you can see a person on the edge of the water

I left a quarter here so someone could use the viewer.

How can you need to "get away from it all" when you are already there?

I thought putting these pictures up would help me with writing a poem.  But the visuals have quite taken over my brain and the words are not doing them justice.  Perhaps it is the variety
of pictures, perhaps the timeframes in which they were taken.  I don't know.  But maybe I'll try again, focusing only on yesterday's photos.

 (time has elapsed here and words have been written and deleted and rewritten)

Okay, here it is.  This started out about yesterday's time at the ocean near our house now,  but became a memory poem about my childhood times at my grandparents' house just a few houses away from where the sunset photo was taken last week.

Sea Memories

There's nothing more I that could want
As I sit upon these boulders
White clouds sail above the sea
And salt spray wraps my shoulders.
I hear the waves crash and hiss,
I watch the cormorants dive,
I smell the seaweed draped on shore,
And feel so much alive.
The taste of salt, the smell of rose
And I am drawn with waves
Back to a simpler, younger time
That my old memory craves;
Ah, yes, there's lobsters in the pot,
Some biscuits, and then tea,
And everyone is gathered round
Our table by the sea.
We eat our fill and grownups chat
The kids run off to play
To climb the cliff and skip some rocks
Way out into the bay
The voices hush and stars come out
It's time to load the car
And head inland to go to bed
It isn't very far
As I watch the seagulls soar and dip
And hear the roaring seas
I'm happy that these kinds of days
Bring back those memories.

©2014, Donna JT Smith