Skip to main content

And Later . . .

BY JEN BRYANT
I take my kaleidoscope off the shelf,
look through the little hole at the end
of the cardboard tube;

I turn       and turn       and turn       and turn,

letting the crystals shift into strange
and beautiful patterns, letting the pieces fall
wherever they will.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Drum Dream Girl BY  MARGARITA ENGLE On an island of music in a city of drumbeats the drum dream girl dreamed of pounding tall conga drums tapping small  bongó  drums and boom boom booming with long, loud sticks on big, round, silvery moon-bright  timbales . But everyone on the island of music in the city of drumbeats believed that only boys should play drums so the drum dream girl had to keep dreaming quiet secret drumbeat dreams. At outdoor cafés that looked like gardens she heard drums played by men but when she closed her eyes she could also hear her own imaginary music. When she walked under wind-wavy palm trees in a flower-bright park she heard the whir of parrot wings the clack of woodpecker beaks the dancing tap of her own footsteps and the comforting pat of her own heartbeat. At carnivals, she listened to the rattling beat of towering dancers on stilts ...
Ritmo /Rhythm BY  MARGARITA ENGLE Mad has decided to catch a vulture, the biggest bird she can find. She is so determined and so inventive, that by stringing together a rickety trap of ropes and sticks, she creates a puzzling structure that just might be clever enough to trick a buzzard, once the trap’s baited with leftover pork from supper. Mad and I used to do everything together, but now I need a project all my own, so I roam the green fields, finding bones. The skull of a wild boar. The jawbone of a mule. Older cousins show me how to shake the mule’s  Quijada , to make the blunt teeth rattle. Guitars. Drums. Gourds. Sticks. A cowbell. A washboard. Pretty soon, we have a whole orchestra. On Cuban farms, even death can turn into music.