Summer evening light

Extended hours on city playgrounds. Freedom from jackets, raincoats, and hoods. The ease, the shadows. Shoulders, no longer hunched against the rain and chill wind, relax.


The passing years have broken this old sidewalk over the knees of tree roots, those of great maples raining shade, and of crippled elms whose leaves in August turn to a lace that sifts the heat. And the breaks have filled with mold from which frail seedlings, already with bark like their parents, hold up green banners of hope.--Ted Kooser, The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book, 2014.