Red Balloon Rising
I tied it to your wrist
With a pretty pink bow, torn off
By the first little tug of wind.
I’m sorry.
I jumped to catch it, but not soon enough.
It darted away.
It still looked large and almost within reach.
Like a heart.
Watch, I said.
You squinted your little eyes.
The balloon looked happy, waving
Good-bye.
The sky is very high today, I said.
Red went black, a polka dot,
Then not. We watched it,
Even though we couldn’t
Spot it anymore at all.
Even after that.
With a pretty pink bow, torn off
By the first little tug of wind.
I’m sorry.
I jumped to catch it, but not soon enough.
It darted away.
It still looked large and almost within reach.
Like a heart.
Watch, I said.
You squinted your little eyes.
The balloon looked happy, waving
Good-bye.
The sky is very high today, I said.
Red went black, a polka dot,
Then not. We watched it,
Even though we couldn’t
Spot it anymore at all.
Even after that.
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Disclaimer
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Laurel Blossom, whose most recent book of poetry is Degrees of Latitude, Four Way Books, 2007. Poem reprinted from Pleiades, Vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, by permission of Laurel Blossom and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.