Granddaughter’s First Picnic

Other children yell, baby, as they run past her,
around picnic tables on their way to adulthood.
Soon, she’ll enter their world
of carelessness and consequence,
but today she nurses on sleep’s sweet breast
through popped balloons and Zac’s protest
against time-out. She is oblivious
to camera flashes, the smell of fried chicken.
But when a little girl touches her
with a bunting feather left behind
at Canyon Lake, that softness stirs her.

***

Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Rune Bear, Event Horizon Magazine, Another Way Round, Ariel Chart, Bindweed Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, Indiana Voice Journal, Peacock Journal, Rat’s Ass Review, and others. Two of her poems were published in the University of Southern Indiana’s 50^th anniversary anthology, Time Present, Time Past. She was a finalist in Poetry Matters’ contest for the Spring Robinson/Mahogany Red Literary Prize.