Aidan Turns 4 on the Beach

by Chris Patterson

It was shrill.
Somewhere between laughing
and screaming, he sounded
like a pony that never knew a
circle walk,
just wilderness and freedom.

Here, where the foam forms
as the wave expends itself,
before rushing back to eat the next,
stealing its thunder,
there wasn't a thing coming
between his thirty-six inch
quivering frame and the
poignant power of the Pacific.

His retreat from the crash
and the spray are calculated.
Do not dare
to hold his hand,
the waves are his.

Accosting them with
tightly balled fists and
emphatic one-footed stomps,
is this 4-year-old's triumphant
expression of
his recently revealed
independence.

The Author

I was born in Elmira, New York and moved around to all the hot spots of the automobile industry growing up. After graduating from Michigan State University, I worked in Chicago as a writer/producer and director of local television and radio commercials and marketing videos for local companies. In 1995, I opened a bagel shop in Hilton Head, South Carolina. When that closed in 1999, I went to work for Walt Disney Company. I currently am a training facilitator at the Disney Reservation Center. I enjoy writing poetry, especially for my family and friends. You can find me on Live Journal as cap_killer.