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A Dolphin's Daughter
On a summer camp’s day the soft girls sang
about kissing boys and bubblegum
and I couldn’t make my short legs go over the rope just right,
felt myself tripping through their arrows of sky,
those girls and their uncrooked ponytails
upon whom the pennies and acorns and birds never smiled
and their mothers were as far away as mine
like a hundred sand-swollen tide shells
and though the acrid world takes me from behind
my pen sinks—from the living water I drink
and let the disappointment refill me
and all that shatters is not the rainbow or childhood
or me here quivering, in the net of all I hope to never become
when the pain of a flower pulled up will remind you
that the earth hurts us by giving us roots and lonely petals.
And when you’ve found her sinking, swimming, withering,
leave the table—and in a crisp crackle of agony a dolphin’s daughter
is gone, leaving us to take care of each other somehow.
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This piece is about a particular place and time that's now long gone--a day of jump roping with other girls who were strangers to me at this summer camp I had to go to when I was nine. As the poem continues, it reflects on death and loss.