Assembly
In stance and dance to an inner beat,
each boy prepared to enter battle
under the August heat of midday,
posturing, challenging, cackling
from beyond the sentinels of cypress,
whose own memories first rooted along
these banks of the Guadalupe—
too old for Mom, too young for wives,
adrift and covered with soot and mud,
a tribal ring formed around flames—
campers summoning ancestral blood
until, over the camp’s loud speaker,
with the trumpeting for Assembly
the feral gathering expired—
precious memories for the river,
and for the fire.
Author’s note: This poem evokes a feral summer rite where boys, suspended between childhood and adulthood, gather by fire and river under the August sun. Instinct, bravado, and ancestral memory rise briefly, then vanish at the call to order—leaving the landscape to remember what the boys cannot.
“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
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