Poem: "Growing Green, Growing Gold"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This is the linkback poem for today's fishbowl. It came out of the September 5, 2017 Poetry Fishbowl, inspired by a prompt from tigerbright. It also fills the "bully in the alley" square in my 9-1-17 card for the Pirate Fest.

Growing Green, Growing Gold

Autumn comes, and with it,
the return to school days,

coordinating consequences
and strategies and responsibilities
across three neurodiverse parents
and two neurodiverse kids.

It's shopping for school clothes
and a different list of supplies
for each individual classroom,
wrangling the conflict of
tastes and budgets.

It's dealing with
the bully in the alley
in a way that doesn't
get anyone arrested.

It's seeing friends again,
and if they're in ones or twos
rather than crowds, it's fine:
not everyone needs to be
in the "in" crowd.

Autumn is the harvest
of energy that has been
growing green all summer,
growing gold now.

It doesn't mean the same thing
to each person, but that's okay:
it still has meaning.

Family isn't only
about sharing blood
or thinking the same way.

It's sharing the green and the gold,
spending the summer and the autumn,
threshing together the days of your lives
into a storehouse of memories.