We Dare
How dare we encourage children to play on the earth’s thin crust beneath which molten lava churns and cracked plates shift and trees—tacked down by roots like those belonging to rotten teeth—drop widowmaker branches upon the drive where my children are playing?
How dare we say, Look, Child, see how those branches are budding? When wind can catch in those same branches and split the tree in half, covering the drive so that we park at the top and stare down at the colossal remains of that great Ozymandias, blocking us from getting home?
How dare we say, Go outside, Child, play near the Old Testament sinkholes, the glass-studded creek, the neighbors with their boundary tripwires and shifty-eyed dogs?
We dare because we once swam in ponds blanketed with algae, hacked paths out of the pathless woods beneath which copperheads sidewinded on their bellies, scrubbed broken gravestones with toothbrushes though we didn’t know where the matching bodies rested.
We stepped on rusty nails and floundered in raging creeks only to be saved at the last possible moment. We wiped out on Dare Devil Hill—the scar on my knee remains—and then hopped back on the bike and went down again. A childhood of joy because sorrow was not kept at bay.
And so, we dare. We dare say, Live, Child. You are not a hothouse bloom trapped under glass but a wildflower meant to dance on the crust of the earth’s beautiful devastation.