Park of the past

Issue #96 of your inbox poetry magazine

Runners run
their rounds in the park where
I used to run in 1K circles.
It is their park now. I
have moved on.

This park, it was our backyard for a while. We lived just around the corner. A lovely apartment in the city, but no own “outside”. We had the park for that. Dogwalking, sunny Sunday picnics. And running. I used to run here. Even did a charity 10K. Ten rounds of 1 kilometre. In this park.

Then, we moved. To another city in another country. Our lives changed. We added lives. And with these new additions, we visited the park this week. Just to spend a bit of time there. It hasn’t changed much, but it’s not our backyard anymore. That was over a decade ago. The dogwalking people are still there. Different dogs, though, likely. There are people sunbathing and picnic-ing. Children are playing. And there are runners. Runners who run that 1K round. Again, and again and again. It’s their park now. But it still feels very familiar to us.

What is your favourite park?

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Poetry elsewhere

Love can hurt. But some poets show that in the resulting scars, there can be victory. And beautiful poetry. Like Faye D’Cruz shows in this poem Wins.

Father’s Day is a glorious day to think about family and write poetry. I have come to really like the poetry by Joe Triton Schmidt, who writes beautiful story poems about life in Gaziantep. Read Father’s Day in Gaziantep.

When we moved away from the above mentioned park, we found a new home (and park doubling as backyard) in Latvia. The day of the summer soltice is celebrated there. It’s one of the most important festive days of the year. A day on which it never really gets dark. I was reminded of this amazing celebration when I read this beautiful ode to the summer solstice by Amy Myers. Read A Summer Solstice Diary (and the other poems you’ll find in this issue of the ACM Weekly newsletter).