By Russell Gardner

Summer Game

 

Remembering my mother's clothes on the line

Drying in summer sun, playing in the breeze,

And when the clothes weren't there

I'd pitch a rubber ball against the garage

Between the clothes-line posts

With rules about a strike or ball (or

If it hit the clothes-line post) where

My mythical opponent-playmate would

Send that ball off his bat into the oat-field

To the south of the lawn, over the large rosebush,

Maybe even so far that it'd hit into the grassed

Waterway that drained the northwest-lying field

Where Amish children now play when not working.

-originally appeared in Free Verse