[lit-ideas] Re: APRIL POEMS (3rd)
- From: Ursula Stange <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 10:23:05 -0400
THE BOYS ACROSS THE STREET ARE DRIVING MY YOUNG DAUGHTER MAD
The boys across the street are driving my young
daughter mad.
The boys are only seventeen,
My daughter one year less,
And all that these boys do is jump up in the sky
and
beautifully
finesse
a basketball into a hoop;
But take forever coming down,
Their long legs brown and cleaving on the air
As if it were a rare warm summer water.
The boys across the street are maddening my daughter.
And all they do is ride by on their shining bikes,
Ashout with insults, trading lumps,
Oblivious of the way they tread their pedals
Churning Time with long tan legs
And easing upthrust seats with downthrust orchard
rumps;
Their faces neither glad nor sad, but calm;
The boys across the street toss back their hair and
Heedless
Drive my daughter mad.
They jog around the block and loosen up their knees.
They wrestle like a summer breeze upon the lawn.
Oh, how I wish they would not wrestle sweating
on the green
All groans,
Until my daughter moans and goes to stand beneath
her shower,
So her own cries are all she hears,
And feels but her own tears mixed with the water.
Thus it has been all summer with these boys and my
mad daughter.
Great God, what must I do?
Steal their fine bikes, deflate their basketballs?
Their tennis shoes, their skin-tight swimming togs,
Their svelte gymnasium suits sink deep in bogs?
Then, wall up all our windows?
To what use?
The boys would still laugh all awrestle
On that lawn.
Our shower would run all night into the dawn.
How can I raise my daughter as a Saint,
When some small part of me grows faint
Remembering a girl long years ago who by the hour
Jumped rope
Jumped rope
Jumped rope
And sent me weeping to the shower.
Ray Bradbury
I've loved this poem for years and it says SPRING in capital letters and
we need to hear that here as it snowed overnight and the wind is
whistling and the rafters are rattling and the garbage can lids are
sailing along the street and the telephone lines are swaying and humming
and no birds sing.
Ursula
in North Bay
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