The Mini-bike

NaPoWriMo 2 April 2026  “Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.”

The Mini-bike, by Elizabeth Boquet
after Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Pittsylvania County”
 

In the driveway, with the garage open,
my brothers are revving the engine,
the sound of adrenaline, of power,
ready for take-off. All three could
do this forever—only one mini-bike
between them, and they do—drowning
out the peep of the peepers by the pond,
as the birch begins its silhouette outside
the kitchen window. What am I after?
Not to twist my wrist for noise, and not
to hurtle down the path to the fire tower,
but certainly not to scrape dinner plates.
My brothers are intrepid, free and pleased
to be enveloped by night, zooming into
looming dusk, despite light’s dwindling.