2021 - 19/30 - Five Girls Playing on the Lawn

[skonen_blades]

These five little girls
Hovering around ten years old
One of them is my daughter
They’re laughing their uninhibited heads off in the sun
Exploding and sprinting
Screaming and playing
Glittering like minnows in the shallows
Each one unique
Hair flouncing, whipping, streaming
They’ve grown up together
Neighbours and pals
Nuclear reactors of life
Shining pre-chrysalis
Puberty just about to tear through their ranks like wildfire
The next ten years are a battlefield and there’s no avoiding it
Time’s steamroller can’t be resisted
That cliff is coming up quickly
That cusp is about to be crowned
Who knows what they’ll be like later
As veterans of adolescence
After the werewolf transformation
The time lapse of hair and stretch marks and hormones
Their brains sizzling into a frenzy
After society’s drooling eyes look at them differently
And the real hammer blows of life start to fall
The rodeo gets well and truly underway
When they become hopeless aliens
Collecting secrets, shame, and loneliness
And all adults become incomprehensibly, cluelessly dense overnight
Before simmering back into actual people years later
After the storm passes

Will these five even be friends then?
In that aftermath?
For now, they pour joy into the world
Angelic in the amber of my memory
Laughing on the front lawn in an eternal summer



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