Summer, 2004
I spent that year obsessing
Over my first birthday
With two digits in it.
I told myself that ten
Is a long time to be alive.
When things get big enough
They earn labels like decades.
I probably have ten more decades, I thought.
Even at the ripe age of a decade,
I was still an optimist.
I sat alone in the gravel, flooding ants
With streams of hot dust from my fist.
Chambers breathed and collapsed in the mounds
As they chewed and excavated themselves.
Bored, I flicked a few maple seeds
Into the heavy air.
A gust roped one and I rode it
As it helicoptered through some power lines.
I saw myself below,
A brief bug pawing around in the soil.
*
Mark Smeltzer is a neurodivergent poet who lives among the mountains of northern Utah with his wife, Chelsea, and their rescue pup, Hashbrown.
