Serengeti Plain

Sunset In Serengeti by Richard Spencer

Serengeti Plain

Through the window she wrote carefully in intimate large rounded letters

“I love you”

Written across the reserves of a Serengeti plain on little girl stationary placed as a talisman against her still planed chest – 

all part of that fearsome summer when a chesty outsider arrived to steal him 

away as the summer heat arrived to use her,

to heat her with a strange aching burning

as she watched from her child’s bed

watched their late-night sprees in the grass behind his house under her bedroom window

her aching for him as futile as a whispered wish for the Serengeti sun to 

light the navied night with equatorial blaze  

Paint on a summer’s day

Dreaming In Red by Yana Ray

Paint on a summer’s day

with paint can in hand they climbed 

the tree to the window

brother and sister beginning one of their sprees,

whispering in the leaves missioned to keep the outsider away –

body to body brushing with a casual intimate touch  

endless nine-year-old reserves dipping their brushes 

again and again into the thick stolen paint

leaving ugly words written upside down,

in their signature style 

words, dripping blood-red on the new “weird boy’s” window.

“Stay away!”

Sliding down with a bump on grass they looked through

mullioned leaves and laughed at their work

even as their eyes met that frightened face watching them

they would have been shocked at how fearsome they were
how painful their paint