![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
satyapriya"By August, the young geese are strong fliers, and the parents take them from the ponds down to the marshes and the shore, where some of them will spend the winter near the salt water. Others fly off, looking for new homelands." - Mary Oliver, UPSTREAM.
High summer,
we're lolling on the verandah,
stripped to bathers,
or underwear,
and each of us eying the others,
wondering who'll be first
to make that noise.
"Mum, Dad, I'm going to-"
Leave home.
Who will it be?
It's holidays now,
school's done.
Dad's joked for years:
"Out you go, the lot of you."
What's the signal,
the moment unspoken,
when the urge to fly
lands on some,
and not others.
Who stays, who goes?
High summer,
and we're waiting for the
honking-goose moment
for one of us to ruffle feathers,
spread wings,
and lift into heat-laden air.
The hours tick,
a sun-burnt tin roof,
cooking our brains,
until we don't know
what the future holds,
except that some of us will
go, and not come back.
*****
I don't know who's speaking here. Someone part of a large family, it seems. It's certainly not my own experience. It feels American to me, perhaps the Mary Oliver influence.
Who are these people, that so many young adults around the same age, are thinking beyond high school to the world beyond, and either reaching for it, or shrinking away?
High summer,
we're lolling on the verandah,
stripped to bathers,
or underwear,
and each of us eying the others,
wondering who'll be first
to make that noise.
"Mum, Dad, I'm going to-"
Leave home.
Who will it be?
It's holidays now,
school's done.
Dad's joked for years:
"Out you go, the lot of you."
What's the signal,
the moment unspoken,
when the urge to fly
lands on some,
and not others.
Who stays, who goes?
High summer,
and we're waiting for the
honking-goose moment
for one of us to ruffle feathers,
spread wings,
and lift into heat-laden air.
The hours tick,
a sun-burnt tin roof,
cooking our brains,
until we don't know
what the future holds,
except that some of us will
go, and not come back.
*****
I don't know who's speaking here. Someone part of a large family, it seems. It's certainly not my own experience. It feels American to me, perhaps the Mary Oliver influence.
Who are these people, that so many young adults around the same age, are thinking beyond high school to the world beyond, and either reaching for it, or shrinking away?