First Bike: Happy National Poetry Month!

Remember learning to ride your bike? Minnesota poet Dave Healy has captured the experience with poignant precision.

First Bike

At Montgomery Wards the bikes and trikes
were segregated and arranged by size.
My father made a deal: I could have
the biggest trike or smallest bike—
no choice at all for any five-year-old.

When we got home he got a wrench 
and attached the training wheels. 
I rode that four-wheeler for a year
or so until one day my father said
“I think it’s time to take then off.”
He got a wrench and did the deed.

How did he know that it was time?
For when I climbed aboard the craft 
that had been shorn of its supports
I pedaled off as if I had been riding 
two-wheelers all my life.

Halfway down the block I stopped
and turned around. My father stood
there, wrench in hand, looking for 
the son who left him far behind.

                      ~ Dave Healy (c) 2018

See another of Dave's poems when he was featured last year here.

Of Walls and Neighbors: National Poetry Month

(By TR001 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Dave Healy is back with another poem, this time alluding to Robert Frost's famous "Mending Wall." 

Something There Is

If we build it will they come?
If we build it how high and long?

High enough to shut out the sun?
Long enough to enclose our fear?

Will one be enough?
Will it ever be enough?

Can a partition admit contrition?
Can we safely hedge our bets?

Who will watch o’er this rampart?
Who will help us unlearn long division?

Can we wall them out
without walling ourselves in?

When our progeny orbit this lonely planet
how many Great Walls will they see?

Hand me another brick.
I can still hear a heart beating.

By Ahazan (own work by Ahazan) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Thanks, Dave. 

What do you think? Do good fences make good neighbors?

Hear Robert Frost read his poem: