A City-Time Gamble

At this delicate beginning,
I expect you to realize
that I often play in the mud.
I just know
you're going to remember
that you hate germs
more than you know why
you slowly grew up to desire
a tall love.

Noble as this knightly day,
chasing butterflies in the city
is a gamble,
and I don't think you realized,
butterflies mean too much to me
to loose this one.

A street smelling sage barks out,
"Excuse me girl, you're too young to gamble."
To that I say,
with a kind of defiance,
"Old enough to love, old enough to gamble mister."

The truth is,
I don't really know, because,
I like to find hidden flowers.
Rare, growing in the impossible places, and
I spend my days
wishing I could fly
and pretending I'm winging the air gracefully
while underwater.

So all I know is chance.
Chance coasting carelessly down.
Ageless, colorless,
but full to the flooding over
with feeling.

Mom

Precisely she writes.
Filling the pages with
each school girl letter.
The letters still carry
a bit of their girlish charm
but they have grown quick
and straight over the solid years.

She has cleaned like she writes,
with precision.
Learning slowly and thoroughly
what she likes,
and in her millions
of tiny and not so tiny discomforts,
discovers more of herself.

She spills over years
of wisdom, first to her own.
Brought into the world
by her pain.
These two people,
with their own ideas,
are slowly learning
to ask her questions,
and to hang on her every word.

She opens her mouth also,
to the world's tiniest questioners,
telling them the basics of life.
Math, letters, history, science.
They will never be the same
because of her.

Today, she looks out
through a fall of tears and cracking red,
and she hunches her small shoulders,
screaming the loss of her own teacher,
her reason why,
the very woman who brought
her into being, in pain.
And she stands short,
reaches out her hands,
and her children come,
their mother's son and daughter,
they stand next to her
and it is right.