Piano Bright The Mornng Ripples Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

Piano bright the morning ripples

In arpeggios of light

Its summer's long treasury

Mimosa flowers flutter in the wafting trees

Pink and feathery in our front yard

And everything feels like a golden holiday

Watermelon and picnics under the trees

No schoolroom instead, we study things we like

Our grandparents bring home in profusion

small marvels for our delight and

Because they come from gifting hands

we love to learn them or we revel differently

completely at liberty

among library books we picked out ourselves

Knowing we have no homework pending

feasting on paperbacks in the mail

from the summer weekly reader offerings

in crisp brown paper tied with string

Sodas in the afternoon sweet carbonations

Or fern fragrant at the summer camps

We walk under glistening boughs after

The summer rains but still miss home

Back again.

And then we feel lavish in our days

As if we splashed in oceans of time

That kind of summer when the roses boiled

In the Little Rock sun

But we had air conditioning on

I remember whenever I want to think

Of freedom, of home

Of root beer floats

hand fashioned by my Grandfather

And movie shows the Saturday matinees

We wished would go on for days

and did in our Disney reenactments

else I dream of Grandmother who

played the piano like Liszt

with her summer litanies to us

Of music theory and of music never ending

of

The stories we told ourselves

In the cricketing, cooling twilights.

Knowing we were loved.

mary angela douglas 6 may 2024; 7 may 2024

;