May 30: Sharon Olds, "The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb," Nostalgia

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

by:  Sharon Olds

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn't
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do.  With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him.  Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on.  What he does not have
he can lack.  The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him.  Everything
that's been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that's been placed in him
will come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

_________________________

Just because I love Sharon Olds.  And I love this poem.  And summer is coming, where my daughter and son will go away to camp for a week.  And I'm feeling a little nostalgic for when my kids were kids, which is dangerous.

It seems like yesterday that I was braiding my daughter's hair on her first day of kindergarten.  Packing goldfish crackers in her Disney Princess lunchbox.  Or we were loading my son on a bus and sending him off to preschool.  I remember he looked so small climbing up the steps of that bus.  He had to take them one at a time.

We keep on packing their bags for them, with lessons and food and advice, until they look at us and say, "Geez, would you back off?  I got this!" 

Saint Marty is still stocking up on the goldfish crackers until that time.