I want to feel as I did
when I was a child of mornings
(coloured, gilded with light).
Sun-dripped mornings when the birds
could remember how to use their beaks like
Piccolos.
My bed was too large for my frame
and so my sheets’ excess
made a vanilla scented cotton mold
of my askew brown-limbed, child’s form.
My window was always open and the
drapes enticed the summer
off the tips of marigolds into my room,
where it would sigh and shift
on a gleaming, creamy windowsill.
Summer morning pushing at my cheeks
painting my face pink and buttery with
its life and tender generosity.
So early, I would hear
active fathers, mowing jade-green lawns
Dads of all sizes, in varied states of vitality.
Hirsute, smooth, in t-shirts and raggedly cut jeans.
Their dogs, trotting excitedly at their
front yards perimeter,
panting at toddlers and snapping
tongue and teeth at unconcerned
rotund, bumblebees.
The insects in the air, agile
Acrobats
Spinning threads of sun like gossamer
sugar-weavers and their miniature
bodies glinting with a humm and a click, with
the motion and rhythm of winged jewels.
Sweet cinnamon butter dripping off my sister’s
round baby cheek
and a chocolaty ribbon, slipping from the sleekness
of her pigtail.
And my mother
as just more than a girl,
in the midst of honey dipped children.
Her teeth, like the whites of our clothes
and the pea-sized dot of toothpaste
she’d squeeze onto our finger-length brushes.
Doors never shut, towels on the lawn
hotdogs and sprinklers.
Aching for those days - for that
childhood, for Summer.
As it was, then.