I sat in my son's classroom
for the first hour of his first day
while he measured away
with a red and yellow tape measure,
finding the length of the rooms,
the width of the dividing wall,
the height of a train tunnel.
He might have been a builder,
an architect, an artist:
so serious, so engrossed
as he checked the dimensions
to make sure there was room
for him.


(First published in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review)