The photo is the small town swimming pool where I was a lifeguard through high school and some of college, but the fancy slide wasn’t there during my time. You only get a hint of the amount of sky that was visible from up on the lifeguard stands, but if you could climb up the one just to your left that overlooks the 4′ end of the pool, you could look out across the tennis courts and I-70 to the fields and the feedlot beyond. Storms usually came in from the west (to your right), and we kept an equal eye on the swimmers and the thunderheads as they grew and darkened.
The Poetry Sisters’ challenge this month is to use Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound challenge from way back in January. His eight prompts were what we were supposed to use to produce eight lines with which we could create a Midyear Pantoum. I wrote one following his prompts and it was…awful. So I broke a few rules and followed others slantwise to come up with this moody summer memory.
I’m not sure which of the Poetry Sisters are in this month, but here they all are, just in case:
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Tabatha has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at The Opposite of Indifference.
The Inklings are meeting In Real Life this weekend! YAY! I’ll look forward to commenting on your posts next week.
A(nother) Year of Reading 
Your description as the watcher of the storms sounds like you could have been Zeus’ assistants… Your last stanza has such power in painting the scene and seamlessly pulls all together! Enjoy your meetup, thanks!
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You’ve captured everything in your description. Mary Lee! Nicely done. I especially like “laughter and splashes meld into music.”
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The pantoum form is so effective with your memory. It has the storm circling around the heat, the lifeguards eyeing the clouds, until finally the pool is empty. Glad you followed it “slantwise” to please yourself.
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This SO captured so many of my childhood days at the YMCA, with everything emptying out with each afternoon storm. And that profound feeling of emptiness I would get…loneliness… at seeing the whole scene bare.
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Laughter and splashes meld into music
In the distance, storm clouds darken.
This whole poem reminds me of my six years working at summer camp. Our camps was a thousand acres in the El Dorado National Forest, and it looked like that picture every afternoon as the clouds rolled in. We’d get them all swimming, get the kids from the outpost camps in for showers and free play, all the while listening for the whistle to herd them all out as the sky boiled over and the wind picked up…
It’s a little melancholy, that the weather was such a character in our stories in the past. A reliable background character. The climate in the Sierras has shifted so much, I’ll bet the clouds don’t roll up every afternoon anymore – I wonder what the constant is now; what our constant will be in another thirty some years…
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I love the moody circling of the storm that is closely watched. I was on the swim team at our neighborhood pool. I never did make it to being a lifeguard.
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Love that you returned to a familiar place to let those memories emerge, repeating, and morphing a little each time. Have a great visit with your poetry pals!
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I love the minor changes you’ve made to some lines to move the story forward. It’s such an evocative poem. As a lifeguard myself, I feel this one.
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Breaking the rules and looking at them slantwise worked, Mary Lee. 😀
I love the way the repetition of time expanding and contracting feels like August to me, feels like my memories of August — from my own childhood and from my memories of being a mom to summer-loving kids.
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