I wrote both of these poems two years ago. I still like them at this time of year.
Kid Salads
Kid salads can be assembled
Out of rhubarb, lemongrass, three cups of mint
To cool your breath right up to your sinuses
Add a handful of hidden blackberries that survived August
When their compatriots had already succumbed to fleeting July
All this from a garden everyone neglected this year.
If you are the youngest child,
You want to use your hands for all of it, no tools
But if your big sister is willing to lend her indomitable energy to the project
You look the other way while she uses the microwave
To thaw frozen raspberries into a cordial
To ice the salad
You are just glad she isn’t too old to make kid salads
If you are the mother,
You bring the salad to the beach
Eat it in your bathing suit
After you emerge from cool water
Encircle your child’s shoulders to feel the heat against your cool palm
He’s been playing in the hot sand while you cooled your fully baked limbs.
Serve the salad with iced tea
Fill cups with store-bought ice.
Enjoy the lovely tubular circles that fit nicely around children’s tongues.
Summer days can be assembled
Around the loosely flowing needs and whims of parent and children
Sometimes singing in harmony
Sometimes pulling and tugging with conflicting needs
until everyone is enticed and soothed
by the sensational possibilities of sun, water, and green fruit
Sprung right up from the earth on a wild whim.
First Day of School
Three backpacks at the ready
Packed weeks earlier in anticipation
Eager new markers and pencils vying for space with
Mundane, cumbersome boxes of Kleenexes and Ziploc bags
Anxious smiles struggle but
Excitement wins out
in the readable revelations
Of three expectant faces
That bittersweet month of August has passed.
Sipping tea on the front porch glider
Blonde six-year-old head on my shoulder
Welcoming the morning with our off-key singing
For as long as we wanted
No schedules
No ugly grids of paper to hem in our days.
Days of river swimming, reading, phone chatting
Planning summer birthday parties
Roasting marshmallows and long star-filled evenings
fade sweetly into the distance
chased out by the new markers and pencils
ready to color and draw the wider world
into action.
Even swimming has lost its appeal
Kids who taught one another new games
And spent hours sketching a sister’s face
Out of the sheer openness of summer days
Now tire of the close company of siblings
The excitement calls us,
teacher mother with new students awaiting,
student children with roles to try on in their new grades,
And Dad, at forty, on his way to nursing school to start something new.
September promises a routine that demands to be taken up again
And the excitement of untested waters.
How we will miss our island in time that is summer
Even though I will breathe a sigh of relief
When the school bus rolls away
Leaving me a day, and more, with my own new markers
Along with the boring stuff, the stuff that needs to be sorted in Ziploc bags.
If only we could sail to that summer island whenever we really needed one another
Whenever the world is too much with us
When friendships are rocky or colleagues unkind
When the ugly schedule grid imprisons our days
When we’d rather be sketching our sister than
Enduring the torture of an unrequited crush
Or worrying about completing math homework
With those now very used pencils.
Or when we just want to sing off-key to the morning
For as long as our voices can sing a summer song.
But the backpacks demand to be carried onto the school bus
Each child stepping up gives me a wave, more confident than nervous
Reassuring me of the balance of retreat from the world
And a return to its September possibilities.
