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      May 27, 2011RecessDiana Goetsch

      A ring of children seated Indian style,
      a girl deciding which head to tap
      as she orbits them in her pretty dress

       

      saying Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck.
      Every boy wants to be the goose,
      to bolt up and run down this girl

       

      before she makes it around
      to the spot he vacated. Once
      they saw her trip and fall, exposing

       

      a lovely backside covered in lace.
      Maybe that is why their heads rise
      like charmed snakes as she passes

       

      saying Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck
      annoying the girls in the circle, who frown,
      and attracting now the attention

       

      of their teacher, leaning against a tree,
      bringing her gaze down from the clouds
      where she had been pondering two men—

       

      the one she recently broke up with
      filling her with regret about the much
      better, more beautiful one from college.

       

      Now she is twenty-nine, on perhaps
      the last warm day of September,
      the smartest, prettiest girl in the class

       

      is going Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck
      in an endless left hand turn,
      and she can’t figure out whether

       

      the girl is powerful or helpless,
      as she blinks back tears and blows
      the whistle to end this.

      from #26 - Winter 2006

      Diana Goetsch

      “In 1995, when I first wrote about the game Duck Duck Goose in ‘Recess,’ all I had was a girl who couldn’t make up her mind. Then last winter I was struck by Keira Knightly’s portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice—nearly condemned to live alone because she said no to a proposal—and I knew I needed to insert the teacher, as a troubled witness to the girl. So the poem was ten years in the making.”

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