Featured Poem: “Hazy Summer Days”

Our latest listener challenge is for high school poets:
write a poem on the theme of summer.
Poet Dorothea Lasky will choose a winnerin time for the start of school. All summer long, we’re highlighting some of our favorite entries here on the blog.

Hazy Summer Days

by Amy, 15 – from Maryland

The hazy heat waves
of summers end float
onto my porch,
but, as I sit minted
in my lawn chair,
I notice a certain stillness
of the way my dog’s chest
rises and falls to the melody
of bees working in harmony
with their blooms,
almost as if to
mock the way
my mother runs her fingers
through my knotty hair
and I notice again
the stillness of this moment,
but now I also see
the ever forward motion
of time clawing at the bee,
bashing at my chair,
and I am reminded that
this moment
has already turned into
a new one where
there is no longer stillness.
But, I smile to myself,
silently building
the stone of that memory
into the castle of my mind.