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Freeway sight of passing amusement:
three balloons
on the back of a truck
whipping about wildly
and trying to beat each other away.
The larger yellow one
is the most emphatic.
It zips back, forth, and around
in that bouncy balloon way
while the other two
merely twitch and flip by comparison.
I dub that yellow balloon the cuckoo of the batch,
thinking of the way cuckoo hatchlings
push their foster siblings
out of the nest.
It is easy to imagine many more balloons
attached to that truck
at the beginning of the ride.
That yellow balloon kicked them all off,
one by one,
and the humans driving didn't even notice.
Cars block our view,
and we look at other things.
Then we spot a small pink balloon
drifting skyward as we pass.
We lay bets and win them,
finally catching sight of the truck again.
The yellow balloon has only the orange one
for competition now.
It is still winning.
We root for the underdog and provide voices,
speaking for the combatants and their
lost floating sibling.
"Mahaha, the truck is almost mine!"
"You will not wiiiin!"
"It's nicer up here by far. I'm gonna go
have an adventure where no one will pick on me."
The truck pulls away again,
battle still raging.
And sometime later, we see
a beaten orange balloon,
drifting off to find its sister,
leaving the truck to the cuckoo.
We do not see the cuckoo in its glory,
nor do we see it realize
in no time at all
that an empty nest is a lonely place.
A while later, we are surprised to see
one last balloon,
yellow this time,
floating away from the freeway.
We hope that the siblings have found each other,
and are already too far away to bother.
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