Playground

The whistles blew; adults in orange vests
Waved us into single file on the white line
Painted on the dark asphalt ground.
We wiggled around like mischievous crows
Eager to return to the game of handball or whispering.

But, inside: I loved the number game
And writing poems loose of rhyming
We even strung together paper cranes
With strings and beads. For afternoons on end,
We sat in desks to make perfectly messy colorful folds.

And, in the end, we waited under the big
Magnolia tree for our ride to swing
Along the curb—one time I was unbuckled
In the morning and a police officer
On a motorcycle hurried after us.

I used to collect the narrow red seeds
That drop from the pods of the tree
In a plastic bag, but it became infested
With white creepy-crawlies.

Remember when you got your splinter?

A time has passed, but when no one’s watching, let’s go again
Above the wood chips boxed in ledge—
Belly on the black swing set—
The feet go zoom! And the world’s spinning!
Spun from the sand, the air, the grass, the obstacle course,
The trees and shade where we congregated,
The top of the slide where we whispered ever more so, and
The bounce of a ball that bounced from you to me to him to her.

Murals forever painted on the wall
Yet the lines of chalk are fading.
The world is spinning in a different way.