photo courtesy of Sarah Duttweiler
Down at the crick-bend we fashioned our green cardboard lunch boxes into a royal fleet,
plopped bobbing globs of paper and tin foil into the clear, cold water- each skewed in its particular way.
Barefooting sandpapered shallows we followed our vessels
to their destination thirty paces downstream
where each drifted past in lazy succession having evaded eddies, branches, and boulders;
entirely unpersuaded by our cheers and qualms.
A silver-plated litter bunch passed the finish stark last
And the boy among us- the youngest at that- remarked,
“We should stay here for the rest of our lives. We could race boats forever!”
The ‘boats’, however, had receded to snack trash
our water logged foil-greens mounded in a sop-drip, defeated heap
communally sagging to the warm rock they’d been dumped on.
The boy’s father- and our leader-
knew we must reach home before the sun left us cold
For not even seven year olds can persuade such things otherwise.
So we scooped up our wares and retreated to the bank, up the hill, through the trees
To a green and silver van not unlike our fleet in which we, at last, sailed away
Leaving the crick-bend to remain exactly as it had before our race.