Near the playground field, page-boy hair chalicing
Her head on its long neck like a tulip,
Taller than her chums, laughing quietly among them
Like a uniformed Helen Hayes in A Farewell To Arms
With Gary Cooper striding toward her down the ward –
Only, the boy wasn’t Coop, and he knew it.
Jonathan Bracker’s poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Writer’s Digest, and other periodicals. Concerning Poetry: Poems About Poetry was published 2018 by the Upper Hand Press. He is editor and co-author of several publications including of Bright Cages: The Selected Poems Of Christopher Morley (University of Pennsylvania Press: 1965; reissued 2015).
