SUMMER
Season of mosquitos and watermelon,
a kind of sticky, itching time when everything grows faster.
Trees, wildfires, time.
Slipping through fingers like crickets,
taking over all the barren space winter left behind.
Until everywhere smells of leaves, bug spray, and smoke.
If spring is the season of new beginnings,
a caterpillar inching its way through fresh, delicate life,
then summer is the season of metamorphosis.
Transformative as campfire embers and the lightning storms of June.
Summer is destruction, you see, creation too.
Burned to nothing by once innocent marshmallow melting flames,
washed clean by flower wrecking rain.
Finally, breaking through memory-worn earth,
softer…
but harsher too, we hope.
Emerging strong enough to survive the fleeting, monarch flurry slumbers of fall.
Rowan Granger is a student of Stargate High School in the North Metro. She is a poet, artist and environmentalist whose love of nature inspires all of her work.