On the Climbing Bars

On the climbing bars
my daughter stands & balances
long yellow hair in the clear wind

this seventh drought year
her sixth year
she straddles the iron

flopping over, hands wide:
Look! A bird!
By night she finds the Pleiades

& asks me what will happen
when the world ends
will there still be moths

& bats, soft faced, umbrella winged
Will the spring frogs sing in the mud
& the hazels rustle

Small bird, I don't know.
But we hold in this life
to thin air & light

(oh, I have so many of these domestic poems, and I rarely sent them out, and only a handful were ever printed. But I needed to write them at the time. Daughter of the poem is now 24, so this was long ago indeed.)