Summer days are fun but nights are better.

Our job as kids calls for us to hit the road
after an oatmeal breakfast to swim, bicycle,and skate
under a saffron sun until our mothers summon us home
in voices only the brave could ignore:
“Now! Come home now or else!”

Kick the Can and Red Rover are favorite daytime games,
but Hide ‘n go Seek rules the darkened streets
on hot flypaper-sticky nights. After bolting down
a reviving supper, neighborhood kids assemble
for round two under yellow-orange street lights,
like a platoon of troops gathering for war game practice.
Real war is raging in a faraway place called Europe
but we don’t bother our fun-addled little heads about that.
War is worry for adults along with rising prices
and the rationing of coffee and sugar.

Sometimes in the steamy blackness we chase glimmering
fireflies with empty Mason jars, lids at the ready, all the while
sneaking peeks at the almost grown-up girl sitting with her beau
on a front porch, the swing on which they flirt swaying
to and fro; low murmurs followed by bursts of laughter
drift out onto the humid evening air and phonograph records
crank out Sinatra tunes in the lighted room behind them.
The boys find the scene disgusting, groaning and hooting
as they do at Saturday movies when their favorite cowboy hero
gets sweet on the rancher’s daughter, but we girls find
it all terribly romantic and long for the day
when we will glide with a boy on a squeaky porch swing.

Late into the lengthening hours when the last
Ollie Ollie Ox in Free has sounded and we have run
until we drop from sheer sweaty exhaustion
onto warm sidewalks and cool lawns, we separate
as if by mutual decree, racing toward lit up windows
that spell home. I scramble up three wooden steps
to the porch where my long-haired, cross-eyed cat
waits for me, safe from scuttling feet and screaming kids.
Creaking open the screen door, I stroll confidently
into sanctuary while my bedmate jumps down
from her sentry post on the swing,
stretches her ancient feline limbs,
and fluffs in through the doorway behind me