Mid-March, on the daily a.m. drop-off
through a bunch of affluent side streets
between school and here
a refrigerated dairy produce truck
keeps catching almond and dogwood branches,
so much that blossoms blizzard
the windscreen and moonroof
and I have to switch the wipers
to intermittent in its slipstream.
All I mean to say is that it was lovely,
that not every given is bleak or wrong
and some even are as gorgeous as they are elementary.
The kids come home on different buses
the same shade of egg yolk.
We call my mother from the shore for Easter.
That truck and blossoms story gets longer,
hokier, with each retelling. I’m not bothered.
April’s bright stretches, the mailman says, are swell.
Our local ‘Y’ widens its opening hours a smidgen.
The clay courts opposite pock and shuffle.
I learn to swim.
- Conor O’Callaghan