Climbing Trees: A Poem

　

Mom seeking quiet

Hurried me outside:

-

Forgetting my shoes by the front closet,

Leaving my socks on the back porch

Through the screen door, then,

Running to the canopying maples

Just past the clustered pines,

-

Mom had things to do, but she gravitated towards

The double paned glass.

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Star burning energy, glimpses of sensation:

-

Climbing high enough to see Robin’s nest,

It’s fluttering wings, perched on the twisted twigs,

Feeding its young.

I perched myself a time or two. Watching my dog, Nicky, chasing squirrels

Along the fence. Sometimes, seeing my mom through the branches.

-

In the crossing of brief moments,

Childhood eclipsed.

-

*

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Time made me responsible,

Education is learning

That I have things to do.

-

Yet sometimes, I climb the wooden stairs,

Past hastily labeled brown boxes,

Stacked on the floor,

From memory‘s dim attic window, I,

Look out from the height of order

Upon that field of summer’s revelry:

-

A taste lingering

Of sweet chocolate and sugar cane

I had got for being a good boy,

Wearing proudly my red ball cap

From playing spring baseball,

Jeans that already had a grass stain,

I see a challenge of bark and sap,

Over twenty feet tall,

And that branch just low enough

To start my adventure off.

*

1/29/2011-6/21/2011

-J.S.