I just joined High Calling Blogs this week after following a poet friend over to their site, and then I couldn't refuse their poem challenge for this week: Streetwise: write about a specific street. My memory immediately took me back to my childhood home where I lived from first grade until marriage in El Cajon, California (a suburb of San Diego).
716 El Rancho Drive
Sunning themselves,
.....the ranch houses spread out
.....in late-afternoon rays.
The old neighborhood in silence exhales.
With dusk creeps
.....a witching moment:
.....the clouded street crinkled with puddles
..........peoples itself.
The now-me glimpses the then-me--
.....dotted with freckles, braids coming undone,
.....the scrape of rollerskates against
..........shallow slope of asphalt.
Memory-teens on wooden skateboards
.....careen fearlessly around the blind turn.
Transparent figures tackle,
.....football wings through darkening sky--
.....echoes of teasing taunts and laughter
..........rise with dribble of basketball,
..........swishing all-air through rusty hoop.
Banana-seated bicycles clatter,
.....skimming surface--
.....front wheels pop from pavement,
..........daring jumps from plywood ramps.
Spectral shapes slide behind mulberry trees,
.....hiding, seeking, racing past rail fences
.....toward homebase.
Toward home--
.....in the gloaming before
.....streetlamps dispel memories.
Copyright 2010 by Susanne Barrett
2 comments:
This was the kind of house and neighborhood I grew up in, too - ranch style, basketball hoops, skateboards, banana bikes -- yep, this was it.
I feel that way when I go home. Like if I could just look hard enough, I would see what used to be. They're right there on the edge of my vision.
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