St. Pete professor and author Thomas Hallock mourns an untimely death on Treasure Island

In January 2023, I lost a family member on the beach at Treasure Island. He was young, too young, dying while doing the kind of thing we do when we are of a certain age. I’ve struggled with writing about him—his story is not mine to tell. While I was pondering and going nowhere, mulling over archived images of Treasure Island, my wife Julie reminded me how people make poor decisions at the beach all the time. (There’s a second story in here, the grief carried by a friend’s mother, whose first-born was buried alive while playing in the sand.) This poem is a modified pantoum, a poetic form in which the second and fourth lines of four-line stanzas go into the first and third of the following. I’m grateful to my writer-friends for help with this piece, especially Heather Jones, who reminded me how the form leans into unreconciled loss and echoing time. Lastly, an English teacher who is into poetry cannot think about things like mortality and time without thinking about the original master of ekphrasis, John Keats.

Beach elegy
Treasure Island. Nineteen Twenty-Three. Fourth of July.
A wafer half-disc of sun, slotted on the horizon
like an unspent silver gelatin coin, poised as if time
itself could stop—which it does when you are on the beach.

An ungrounded power line runs out towards the horizon,
feeding a streetlight on the dock—what could go wrong?
After all, the rules are different on the beach. No one
in their suspendered swimsuit thinks, I came here to die.

At a place called Sunset Beach, what could go wrong?
In modern Florida, electric lights replace a dying sun.
Teenage girls will starve themselves for a bikini.
Boys dive into the pool from their hotel balcony.

My childhood friend’s mother lost her first born son
while he was playing in the sand—buried alive. You
will learn to live with the loss, she said, you move on,
though a parent never recovers from the loss of a child.

It’s a trick, how twilights linger on the Fourth of July.
In gaudy, colorized postcards of this now pastel horizon,
the power lines are gone, scrubbed out—maybe forgiving
mistakes? Forgive. It’s what we do when we are on the beach.

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This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2025.