Child's Play Poem by Jacqueline Marcel Hawthorn

I fall back into the clasp of the long green grass, a snake unravelling in my mind,
Pushing between the heavy damp earth and weightless sky I soar
As a sparrow-hawk, plummeting, dizzy with success and fall in a strike that
disorientates the clouds. Drop like a pewter stone into the quiet thanks
of the river banks that waited until I was ready to part the waters as a chainmail fish
leaping and diagonally twisting, glistening, turning and all the while
learning how to push forward with the plunge and gentle stoop of a turtle on the sand, feel my hands splay into fins, webbed feet, launching into the atmosphere as a drake without grace
and hoping, when I fall I’ll land on flint grey hooves and buck and rear into the world
as a little girl, lying in the long green clasp of youth and thought and poetry.