Aches and whispers

For my daughter:

Summer grass aches and whispers with
the dreams of a young girl’s heart.

As I watched from the kitchen window
and cows grazed in a field where they lived their whole lives,
Anne lay in the yard listening to Italian tapes,
writing a daring adventure set in Tuscany.
She saw beyond the trees on the horizon
of an Indiana farm to a world she had yet to know.

On my laptop,
this summer she stares at me through large, dark glasses
so that men cannot see her blue eyes,
a red scarf wrapped around her head.
“Ever-restless envelop pusher” she proclaims next to her photo.
She is crouched in an ancient desert.
In her hand she holds the top of a skull,
the absence of four lobes marked in relief under a white sun.
Her face is beaming, happy, as carefree as I have ever seen it.

She is of this earth--
part of the Coliseum,
the canyons of Petra,
the tomb of Napoleon,
the rocky shores of Taormina,
learning to drive a stick shift 30 miles outside the imaginary line
that divides the stolidity of Jordan from the chaos of Iraq.

She could be on Mars but she is bounded by this globe,
free of the bad dreams that plague those limited by their fear.

First line is taken from a poem by Carl Sandburgh