Poetry of Issue #8 Page 51

Those plastic orange meal-trays
did not break despite our use
of them as toboggans

on that slope above the lake,
just aside the school on the late
afternoon we returned

before the teen-students
and their scholar-needs
that would eliminate

the time and empty hill
necessary for our twilight
descent from untrammeled

snow to its mate of the same
below, blue-white under
the spectrum-range of red

January’s skies displayed
like a banner as if in defiance
of the month’s frigid decree

and allied to our revolutionary
regression to childhood slides
we would put aside in a dropping

hour, just as those trays that would
slide back under an identical,
unused kitchen mate in a dark

and quiet cafeteria to which we,
as adults and moderate local powers,
had privilege to its flexible wares,

while our imagination held the key.

John Zedolik