Published online with The Courtship of Winds, 2020
The children that run in the skeletal remains
of what was once a great public pasture
of ornamental grasses and trees decorating themselves
with bulbous fruits, red and brown,
alien jewels or swollen bellies or
the freshly laid eggs of an imagined bird.
Under the dried-out corpses of those once colored trees,
the children chase.
They chase one another- it and not it
it and not it
in the solemnly fading light
of a weary February sun.
Novices at the sacred sport of watching games
would think that they are having fun
while they flee like unbroken stallions
bursting through the futile walls of an old pine gate.
They are wrong.
I am an experienced bench-sitter, a veteran of winter splinters,
I lived the renaissance of watching games
and I can tell you
firmly tell you
that they are afraid.
They know how other children hunt
with gnashing teeth and hot, hot blood
they know
because they have all been hunters before.