If you were light
and could play on a rose,
would you slide,
do you suppose,
down velvet hill,
where shadow splash
marks your soft plop
with grinned panache?
Then would you climb back up,
find that shy frill,
and pirouette there
in lucent trill?
Would you leap tip-to-tip
with weightless toes,
like drunken sprite
in perfumed throes?
Under, behind
each vale and peak,
would you dodge and dive
in hide-and-seek?
Would you stop perhaps
and oly-oly-ocean-free
to bask in the stillness
of unfurling reverie?
There is mystery here, dear reader. Apparently some call “olly-olly-oxen-free.” I was intrigued to see that some people who were kids in the Chicago area called “oly-oly-ocean-free” because that’s where I was a kid and that was our cry. So, oxen or ocean, nobody knows, though I did like the suggestion that olly/oly came from all-ye as a call at the end of the farm day to put everything, including the oxen, away for the night.
I remember it as inviolable. Once called, nobody could be tagged. Non-negotiable.
Many thanks to Susan Rushton for the beautiful photo!
When red hides behind pink
Oddments 