A poem dedicated to the toddler who bit me on the leg
I learn something about life at preschool summer camp
A poem dedicated to the toddler who bit me on the leg when I worked at a preschool summer camp.
~
I am not a child.
I am something stuck between the teeth
of adolescent confidence and adult despair.
This is my first job, and a toddler has already
bit me on the thigh. She senses, perhaps,
this weakness in being,
this herbivore instinct.
~
I had forgotten
about the wild spirit of girls
before they become pruned branches.
But a bow bounces across the room,
a girl hurls a Brontosaurus and roars,
she topples the block tower of another.
~
I pick out the long-neck dinosaurs
from the primary-colored buckets,
and for a moment I want to tell
the girls what I have learned: the
Brontosaurus keeps its head low
to the ground and sways
from one small shrub
to another.
~
But then I tell them something else:
that Brontosaurus necks were designed
so that they could brush their long hair
with clouds and flocks of seagulls.
That every single vertebra giggled
as they hoisted up their head
to help them lick the stars.
~
I want to tell them about fossilized
fortitude, about big bones, about
amber antics, about Jurassic jerks,
about cunning carnivores…
But instead I settle for explaining,
that something so big,
and so mighty,
should never keep her head low.
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Thank you for reading!