Silence warm and scented as summer

A poem about childhood and safe places

Photo by Matthew Ball on Unsplash

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I published this poem here two summers ago, and am bringing it back for an encore. It tells one of the happiest stories I remember about the kid I was.

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HUT                                                                                         2023


I am ten years old, curled on my side,
lying on red dirt and dry grass
inside a round squat heap of a hut,

built with a friend bored on a sleepover;  
framed in long bendy branches joined at the top,
small branches woven crosswise, and spread over all

heaps of dried pine needles, raked up and wheelbarrowed
from under the giant trees near the woodpile
back down the deer-trail to where the hut now stands,

frail and sturdy and mine, all mine — 
the friend gone home, politely scarcely missed,
while I strengthen the frame, heap the pine needles thicker,

nestle into the space inside where two
could sit but one can stretch and breathe deep, 
can lie on her side holding a library book

or letting it fall closed, reading about Laura Ingalls
or Mary Poppins or watching sunlight shift
through layer on angled layer of piney dust,

can sit up turning empty pages in a notebook
with a purple cover, the secret notebook I hide here
in a secret place, its pages waiting for secret knowledge

I don’t know how to gather or write down:
knowledge of magic, of daily skills and powers,
knowledge echoed in the songs we sing in Sunday school,

knowledge that could draw back the curtains
in that house a hundred steps away where my father
and mother live, shadowed and cold in their silence – 

while here between more fragile walls
the silence is warm and scented as summer,
and all the knowledge that I lack and long for

folds between the covers of an empty notebook,
hides deep in a heap of brown pine needles,
their dust still fragrant with the long life of trees.

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