Adults trickled into the home
They wave at me as my eyes
dart through the last pages of the newspaper
shouting, “ball” at every round thing my pupils catch
One of them rolls a plastic ball at the ‘kid’
Everyone smiles, and I do too, and then
I roll it back, because a broken thing is still broken
no matter how many people smile around it
Their match begins in our concrete backyard
and their thrifty feet leave the dust of adulthood behind
in the smacking of the red-hot ball against the concrete
The ball became a missile once it left the bat
The sun meant nothing to them
The corner garden meant nothing to them
The neighbour’s wall meant nothing to them
They jumped it, laughing, and the ball came back
My uncle cups it in his hands
hides it behind his back, conspiring with himself,
runs, releases, and the hot wind takes it
the concrete sings again as it finds the bat until
The corner garden swallows the ball whole
The adults trample the plants, puzzled,
The adults circle the corner, puzzled,
The kid walks past them, eyes darting
“Ball”, I shout for one last time and pick it up
The way I would always find things
by watching first, by waiting, by knowing the garden
before I ever had to enter it
NaPoWriMo Day 2 prompt – Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.
Smoke words every day. 