Summer Flames

She said we could! She said we could!

Mom said yes, so we rush to the fire pit.

Get some sticks! Get the paper! Find a match! Start the blaze!

We dash through feathery young-summer air.

Crumpled newsprint bleeds onto our hands

Three tiny matches gown the wads with fire

We cage them in with bark-crusted branches.

A fuzz of smoke curls from our umpteenth fire.

Get the books! Get the books!

We run inside and run back out,

Holding tight the math textbooks.

Squashed between their pages are:

twenty cups' worth of spilled tea,

a slabs' worth of smeared graphite,

and untold gallons of despairing tears.

We gather, panting, round the fire.

Holding Math 5, Algebra 1/2, Geometry, PreCalculus.

Staring at the flames that we have made.

We look at the books, we look at each other.

We picture the million problems inside our Books.

We've cried over, sulked upon, sobbed about, raced through, double-checked and re-corrected

each one.

We want to be rid of them.

Then we think of the ink on those pages

Fattening the hot feather smoke.

We picture each page curling black.

And every lesson crumpling dark.

And every problem eaten and lost forever.

Forever.

Forever is a long time.

We look at the books, we look at the flames.

And we are sad.

And we don't know why.

We kick out the fire. We cool ash with water. The smoke is eaten by summer.

Carrying our books with benevolence,

We take them inside and put them away.

Because we are not book burners,

not even for PreCalculus.

And because summer feels too good for burning.