What Children Know by Cecil Morris

That adults move like weather through their world,
sometimes as invisible as perfect
fall days—warm and clear with the slightest breeze,
just enough to make the bubbles blown stream
away or lift the kite to the endless,
cloudless blue, sometimes as oppressive
as hot and muggy summer afternoons
when the world seems too close, too tight, too much
to bear, when it flattens and enervates,
when it drains all joy from games and wearies
the bicycle, and sometimes as scary
as thunderstorms—the cracking, booming sounds
that make the house shudder and scare the dog,
the brilliant flashes that rip from nowhere
to nowhere, that sear paths on retinas,
that scar the landscape where it touches down.

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Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and enjoy. He enjoys ice cream too much and cruciferous vegetables too little. He has had a handful of poems in 2River View, The Cobalt Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, The Evening Street Review, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.