A Place to Play

(My daughter wrote this for her English Class a year and a half ago. Wednesday's post reminded me of it.)

Children need a place to play,
a place where troubles fade away,
a place where night can turn to day,
in the twinkling of an eye.

It may be in a favorite tree*
where branches serve as chairs for tea
and trunks as masts set out to sea,
as sails go by.

It may be in an attic room
where a maiden meets her groom
and stories from a magic loom
are woven into dreams.

Or, perhaps, on summer lawns
where games give way to tired yawns
and clouds are fish, or fowl, or fawns,
or so it seems.

Childhood, you see, is not a stage
or photos pasted on a page
of time let go at a certain age
or on a certain day.

Childhood is a state of mind,
the innocence we leave behind,
the day we can no longer find
a place to play.

By: Kim K. January 30,2005
(In memory of our little blue house with the *tri-colored beech in which the girls spent hours. This house was on Berkshire Rd. in Waterloo, Iowa, where the girls lived most of their lives. Click photo to enlarge.)