Retreat: A poem by Donovan Baldwin

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Blame it all on "Treasure Island". I saw the movie and my great aunt Lula King sent me the book. That was in the early 1950's and I still have the book, and a passion for almost anything by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The poem, as you can guess, is about me. I was there, this was/is me. I was the boy on the beach dreaming of far off lands. Often, I wish I had never left. But don't a lot of us wind up this way? I walked the beaches of Pensacola, Florida for years. How I wish I could go back. Not just to the beaches, but to the boy.

However, I have changed, and as much as I love and miss the white sand beaches of Pensacola, I love my hillside retreat in the center of Texas now. The birds sing, the wind whispers through the trees, and I have a great view of a valley. Not the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps, but it stretches to the horizon as if it were a sea of green.

There Once Was a Boy

There once was a boy on the edge of a bay
With the sun burning hot on his skin.
For hours he'd walk the white sugar sand,
Whipped by the offshore wind.

The wind that brought strange, unusual smells,
Mixed with tales of lands far away,
To the shore by the woods, and the boy on the shore,
Who walked by the edge of the bay.

From the shore he would long for lands still unknown
Where adventure was part of each day,
Not knowing how much of his soul would be lost,
On the day he at last went away.

Now round the world in a land of boy's dreams,
The boy who has grown to a man,
Who is longing to feel that offshore wind,
And to walk on the sugar white sand.

**Oct 5, 1980, Published in "Alura", June 1991**

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Don Baldwin
P. O. Box 380819
Duncanville, TX 75138