Girl led means letting children decide
Will we go left or right or straight?
Will we take the bridge
or the hollow or the hill?
Do we stop for mushrooms
or dead birds?
Might we squeal at deer
or feign exhaustion?
Will the busy system be tested?
Will the campsite trail maps
lead us astray?
Will impromptu skits emerge
from the band of merry scouts
traipsing along sylvan paths?
Will each hiker cycle through
five stages of grief
and then tack on
seven stages of mania?
Will bright raincoat-clad teens
surge ahead
Surfing on the crest
of rulesets while forging faster,
manufacturing hyena-like bird calls
as they speed walk around the next bend?
Will they each take turns questioning authority,
creating their own power structures,
polities rising and falling
faster than Rome in a day?
Will girls share stories
of morbid true life headline stories
about hiking gone awry?
Will we finally find our way into dappled,
then full sunlight,
and emerge victorious near the camp store?
Will we survive this?
Will we go from huffing to hooray-ing,
high on the elixir of relief?
The answer
to everything,
of course, is:
Yes.
2026 Poetry Challenge - Generational - Humor - Loosely Hinged - Of Place - Poems - Pun-y / Tongue-in-Cheek - Rants - Reminiscing - Unserious
