Summertime

Shelley Armitage

August 3, 2025

after the song

We had only summers past for reference:

Mama Dunn’s June backyard, plastic tablecloth

catching the breeze, watermelon seeds

a gestalt among sandwiches.  

The lake on a still day, Dad dragging

water skiers behind his fishing boat,

underpowered prop making a pitiful wake.

A lover sharing prickly grass and not minding it.

A summer romance at band camp, gardenia corsage

suffocating the night air.

Each an ordinary grace.

But Camp Mystic, who knew what to expect

with a name like that

fireflies more magic than cell phones

--night necessary for light--

without it they were only bugs in a bottle.

An all-girl Christian camp, no boys,

no cell phones, cabins along the Guadalupe River

where you could scratch your name on the same ceiling 

 your great grandmother signed in 1927.

Oh, the traditions!

Charm bracelets bear witness years later.

The second graders were lodged near the river

Safe, FEMA declared this old flood plain.

A nest of new friends, joined in Christian love,

with goals to be a better person through

spiritual growth among the mighty cypress,

the oak, and grounding sumac.

Who named this recreating river? Some mystic ties here too:

Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, our mother of miracles

Spaniard explorer Alfonso de Leon named the river in 1689.     

But the rogue river tells another story:

Locals call these environs flash flood alley

No lessons in canoeing nor chapel prayers

can stop a high rise

Especially one that comes after midnight

It would be easy to blame the river

masquerading as a friendly old gal

pooling green waters filled with catfish,

buoyed inner tubes, agile kayaks

in a summer rite of passage.

No, no one could teach

how to swim upstream,

against the raging river

How to cling to a tree

How to take to the sky

away from snakes and debris

as another soul is washed 

in the ineffable waters

Or how to say the Lord’s prayer

with frothing foam churning

in the mouth.

Be a light for all to see

in this pitch-black wall of death.

Shelley Armitage is an emerita professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.  She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and her most recent book is A Habit of Landscape (Finishing Line Press).  She also has new poems in the forthcoming collection, Unknotting the Line (Dos Gatos Press). Her award-winning memoir, Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place, was a Kirkus Review starred book and featured at the Tucson Book Festival.