Out for Good - Sept 4 2023

 

Out for Good

Sept 4 2023

The long weekend

before school.

A serious time

of deadlines

and drudgery

and numbing busy work,

when kids will learn

mostly useless things

they'll forget after the test,

while the world turns sympathetically

into cooler days

and early dark

and a carpet of dead leaves.

As if the pathetic fallacy

they taught us in poetry class

could actually be real?

But enough about the weather.

When now

a gentleman of leisure

in his so-called golden age

I still remember the mix

of excitement and apprehension

before the first day of school.

When summer

was already starting to seem

lost in a golden haze,

if not quite mythological

then at least a sun-drenched dream.

And how selective memory is,

forgetting

those long stretches

of nothing to do.

The bug bites and sunburns

and all-day summer rains.

The losing games

of shirts and skins

when I was picked last.

And the cute girl from class

who never returned my calls.

It's surprising

how little time

nostalgia takes.

And now that time

has sharpened my gaze,

I think back

on all the summers past

and couldn't be happier

that schools out for good.

That the long weekend

is just another Monday

at the start of a golden fall.