Sunday Surf Poem: Surf-boarding by Marion Strobel

Sunday Surf Poem has arrived—and it’s a rhyming one. Surf-Boarding by Marion Strobel.

Marion Strobel was a fiction writer, critic, and poet, and an associate editor of Poetry from 1920 to 1925. The daughter of Charles Louis Strobel, a successful civic engineer, she married the prominent dermatologist James Herbert Mitchell in 1922 and settled with him in Chicago.

Hmm. But was she a surfer?

That would’ve been around the time Agatha Christie surfed. In one review of Strobel’s poetry, her “athletics” are mentioned—so who knows? Maybe she did surf. Either way, the poem is fun.

Surf-boarding

By Marion Strobel

Our palms are wet, our fingers clinging
Like sea-weed. I hear you singing,
As over waves, from crest to crest,
With fear a sickle in our breast,
With fear a whistling in our mouth,
We turn the surf-board south-east … south!We shift our weight and slide and pass
Like shadows gliding over glass.
We stretch our bodies taut like sails,
Until our icy fingernails
Press on our palms; and we are plunging
Into the surf, and upward lunging,
Until our mouths gape open, wet,
And spray gleams on our lips like sweat.

And overhead a wave like thunder
Turns the board. And we go under!

Author: The Wipeout Weekly team