Summer Vacation

Summer vacation was its own country—
a place that operated by different laws,
no alarm, no schedule, no particular purpose
except the great, ungoverned because.

The days were long in the way that only childhood
manages to stretch and hold its shape—
the morning took the whole of morning up,
the afternoon had room enough to drape

itself across the heat and the slow hours,
and evening came like something you had earned.
The school year may have been where knowledge lived,
but summer was where the living was learned.
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