Poem of the week: Surfin’ by Jessie Lendennie

I’m lying in the MRI machine
With the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ Safari
Drifting in the background
between the pounding
Sounds of machinery.
Ah, is this a cosmic irony?
Even though I never surfed
I feel the sand between my toes.
I have outlived my grade school
Contemporary Carl Wilson
By two decades
Yet here he is
Surfing the magnetic waves
Across an ocean
Of sound
Right down into the bones
Of the California girl
I used to be

Jessie Lendennie was born in Arkansas and settled in Ireland in 1981. Her publications include Daughter and Other Poems in 2001 and Walking Here (2011). She compiled and edited Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, 1981-2007 and Even The Daybreak: 35 Years of Salmon Poetry (2016). She is founder (1981) and Managing Director of Salmon Poetry and currently working on a memoir, To Dance Beneath the Diamond Sky.