This is my very first little art quilt from a million years ago. It's not very good, but I'm sentimental about it because it was my first. I remember how liberating it was to cut the windows into it.

 

                    Glories  #5

Oh to be seventeen on a night in June--

          a night with air thick and beguiling as scent,

          a night Prussian blue

                    backlit with twilight.

A night moony with possibility.

To be driving headlong to the hills--

Escaping in the old Impala with the top down

          and the music blasting.

Fleeing fast through that soft dark,

Running from all that has made you

          and all that you are so far--

                    into mystery.

Oh to be seventeen on a night in June--

          the air honey thick with hungers.

To be lean and leggy and bronzed.

To have gypsy bangles clicking on your wrists,

          gardenias from your mother's porch

                    behind your ear,

To be windblown and smelling of beach and sun

And sitting on some boy's front porch

          in a syrup of jasmine and cricket song.

To try different outfits on your dreams

          like they were paper dolls

And parade them for the look in his eye.

To feel the moon pull on your blood

          like it pulls on a hatch of moths

                    spiraling up into the dark.

To be so naive, so fearless, so willing.

Oh to be seventeen on a night in June--

To swing in the dark park too high with no hands,

To lean so far back your hair brushes the sand,

To jump without fear about how you might land,

          Oh to be seventeen on a night in June.